


Nanobotti Manicotti

by Sherb42



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cat gets put into a cage, Fanart, Gen, I'm sorry the title is the dumbest shit that I could think of, Multi, Season/Series 08, mentions of mpreg, minor 4th wall humour, more tags to come, roboarm Lister, they didn't treat season 8 right so I'm going to do it instead
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2019-09-25 09:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 51,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17118914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sherb42/pseuds/Sherb42
Summary: Directly after the events of Epideme, the Starbug crew finally catches up to the long-lost Red Dwarf. Things are not all as they seem when they discover not only that all of the old crew are alive, but for them, Lister and Kochanski had only been gone a few hours.Stuck in prison for stealing the Starbug and confidential crew files, they find themselves roped up in a conspiracy that threatens all of their lives – and maybe even the future of the universe itself.[This is a work in progress, any comments, critiques, and other such interactions would be greatly appreciated.]





	1. A Call to Arms - Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been working on this for ages, and the time has finally come to be able to start posting this. Huuuge thanks to thecowboyarthistorian for helping out and looking over this (and thinking up the title), love ya mate.

Even as early as the first half of the 21st century, robotic prosthetics have been commonplace. One of the best places to see an example of this was on the former 7th colony of Mars where it used to be a status symbol based on how much you were augmented with robotics and computers. If modern history has taught us anything, it's that a post-electronic uprising ghost town on Mars is pretty damn cool, among other things. For David Lister (Senior and Junior, former third technician, hopper driver, amateur rock star and frankly not much else), he knew this all too well. Not the part about being cooked from the inside out by a psychotic AI taking over the solar system and forcing a technological reset to akin to the early 1980s, but the arm thing - although that was really only from the last 20 minutes or so - not even that really. He was too young by about half a century to have been there for the first thing anyways. After he had lost his right arm to a force known as the Epideme virus about a week ago Lister was left with two choices; One, to learn to live without it (a hard pass), or two, search through what little was in the medibay and cargo hold in terms of robotics to find something that could replace it. 

The one that Kryten, their ship’s 25th century-‘fresh’ sanitation mechanoid, had put together from one of his spare parts was a start, but it wasn’t a very good one. The spirit was there but that was about it. Living on a spaceship without an arm was awful, but begrudgingly in this time, Lister was slowly starting to get the hang of a couple of things. All that was going to change if they could get the arm to work properly, so it wouldn’t have mattered. 

Kristine Kochanski, a former navigation officer and accidental mother to our one-armed hero, had been the one working on the arm for the most part. Right now she was soldering a small wire to another with the shell of the prosthetic arm flipped up. She was also wearing one of the Cat’s old pairs of sunglasses to try and protect her eyes from the sparks flying up at her face. Kochanski wasn’t an engineer by trade, but she knew her way around a circuit board enough to know what she was doing. Lister was sitting on the medibay stretcher with his robotic right arm stretched out and a can of resyce larger in his other, watching her as she worked. It was a two-handed job, so he wasn’t able to help much aside from moving his fingers around when she wanted to test a connection and keeping watch for any unseen slip-ups that she never ended up making. 

The crew had attempted to use nanobots to reconstruct his arm before reverting to a prosthetic. Kryten had them in his system for repairing old circuits and minor damage and it was mostly how he was still functioning after all these years. The main problem with this plan was that these little things weren’t designed for flesh, organic material was a lot more complicated than that. Sure with work and reprogramming they might be able to recreate tissue or even be able to sew up a cut or scrape, but a whole entire arm? One where the muscle, skin, and nerves had been burnt shut by a laser scapple and was already scarred up? Good smegging luck with that. 

“It’s a shame the nanobots didn’t end up being much use, it would have saved us so much trouble,” Kochanski said, soft hazel eyes focused on what she was doing. Those were one of the few things that Lister ended up genetically inheriting from her. 

Lister sipped his drink and nodded. As a technician, he knew all about this sort of stuff, but she seemed to work with more, hmm, grace? Pride? Competence? Who knew. 

“I think it’s a bug in the software,” Kochanski pushed her chair back across the room and sat at a computer, pushing the sunglasses up onto the top of her head in the same motion, “I can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong.” 

“I think it’s just a bit daft’,” Lister responded, closing the case and rubbing his two hands together. The feeling wasn’t really there in his right arm, but it was enough. It was a bit like being a hologram, but only in his arm and a lot heavier.

“It could be better, I’m so close.” She said with a distracted huff. 

“I think you’re going to drive yourself crazy if you keep this up,” Lister responded sincerely. In all honesty, he didn’t know quite what to say. Maybe Kochanski felt responsible for the loss of his arm, maybe she was just using the time to keep herself occupied and distracted from her situation. Either way, she seemed at least a little bit more stressed than usual as she typed away at the computer, looking for something that would give her a satisfactory adrenalin rush of getting this shoddy bit of old robotics up and working again. Kochanski hadn’t let herself celebrate with the others’ when the electronic arm first started working, the job just wasn’t done yet. 

Before Lister could continue their conversation, a toothy face appeared on a wall mounted monitor. It was the ship’s Cat, or simply known as ‘Cat’, who was currently manning the controls of their ship. Cat had a name, but he doubted that any of the humans on board would be able to purr and chirp correctly to pronounce it. Plus, they had never even asked him what he had been called before they showed up, so ‘Cat’ was perfectly fine by his standards. Cats didn’t really have a need for names anyways, he still didn’t really understand why Humans needed two or more of them. The cat was their pilot of the ship, using his reflexes and attention to detail to ensure they weren't going to run smack bam into something. He wasn’t an official pilot by any JMC or Space Core standards, but he was the best out of all of them. “Hey buds, you guys better come down to the cockpit, I think the scanners have found something worth takin’ a look at.” 

“What do you think it is?” Kochanski asked with newly-acquired spring in her voice, turning her head to the monitor. 

“Some sort of big ship, like reeaaal big.” Came the replied purr from the screen. Cat was half looking at the camera and half another screen to the side. 

Lister spoke next. “Any life signs?”

“I can’t seem to see anything yet on the readin’ since it’s pretty far away from us, but it’s a ship alright.” Cat smacked his lips and turned off the transmission. The screen turned back into a spinning JMC logo as the two humans exchanged a look. A ship would have supplies and stuff to loot, brutal. It would also give a good test run of his new appendage. Lister unplugged his heavy, pinkie-purplish arm as the two of them left the room in a hurry. As they walked towards the front of the ship he ran his artificial thumb over his new fingers trying to better his controls of the thing. It was a lot harder to do then you would expect it to be, but that didn’t matter right now. 

 

 

When Lister and Kochanski arrived, they took their usual chairs looked up at the screen that Cat had projected over the ship’s plexiglass windscreen. The ping was weak, but it was definitely a ship. “It looks like it could be a simulant battle mothership, I’ve encountered these before,” Kochanski said with confidence as she studied the readout on the monitor before her. 

“Ya think?” Asked the cat. 

Lister flicked a few switches on his side of the console. It took him a few seconds to adjust how much force he needed to use in his new arm to do so. “I’m going to put in another scan for Red Dwarf, if the reading we’re looking at is correct this might just be it.” He said excitedly, it sure seemed big enough, and they had been trying to track it for several years now. The exact signal they had been tracking all this time had gotten weaker and weaker as time went on, but it was still there for their tiny transport ship to follow. 

“Ya think?” Asked the cat again, this time directed at Lister. 

Lister turned back to the woman sitting behind him. “Why was _that_ your first guess?”

Kochanski shrugged. “Once, back on my old ship we pretty much boarded one blindly thinking it was Red Dwarf after an exploration out. It’s a miracle that we got out of there at all, alive or not.” She replied. Lister put his lip to one side and swivelled his chair back around. Fair point. 

“You’ve lost your Red Dwarf, too?” The cat asked her, pushing some switches on his side. 

“No, that was the embarrassing part.” She said dryly, not really wanting to think about it. 

“A new readin’ coming in, brace yourself,” Lister spoke after a bit of a pause.

The three of them turned their collective attention back to the screen. A large ship, weak life signs, no response from any onboard computer. Blurry visuals came in next, the tone of the room changed as it came into focus. 

Lister was right, they’d finally caught up with Red Dwarf. The large red ship was moving across space at its own pace but they were heading right towards it. He pretty much jumped out of his chair, excitedly playing with half of the console trying to get better contact with their old home. You could see the pure joy in his eyes as they met with the other two sets in the room. Cat joined in with the enthusiasm grooving slightly in his chair. 

Lister pretty much jumped over the console to go back and tell Kryten about the new development. He yelled out the news with more energy than Cat after a coffee. “The ship Kryten! We’ve caught up to the ship!” Lister called out as he swerved around the doorway. 

Kochanski had been working at her station checking over the readings that they had managed to scrape together when the two of them returned. Hologrammatic windows of all sizes littered her prehensile vision. Lister slid back down into his seat and begin to try and contact the ship’s computer, Holly, with an excited click of a keypad. 

Nothing. 

Lister called for Holly again through the voice channel. They were close enough to see each other, so why couldn’t they open up any communications? There was no reason that Lister could see for Holly to have shut themselves off. 

“Alright Cat, take her towards the ship and find us somewhere to dock,” Lister said giving the full manual controls over to the Cat. He pushed himself back out of his chair to go and tell Kryten of the news in person. They would just have to deal with this Holly problem once they got back onto the ship. 

“Aye Aye,” Cat replied half-distracted by his reflection in the windscreen. That was half the reason why they needed the co-pilot – because that happened so often. 

This was it, everybody was finally going home. Or really, the closest thing they all had to one, and that was enough.

 

 

* * *

 

It would have taken around 7 hours at their current speed until Starbug would reach Red Dwarf and most of that time was spent packing up everybody’s stuff. During this time they also broke up for a celebratory lunch and the last of the champagne that had been stored away for this very occasion. 

Starbug had been their home for almost two years, everybody was more than excited to be able to leave. Anticipation was killing Lister most of all, he and Kochanski had been working away at packing up all of Cat’s loose clothing and sewing stuff for the last few hours as per the feline’s request. The thinking behind this was that packing stuff up now would make it easier to empty out Starbug once they arrived back, but it would still take at least several full days of work to sort and clean the place out of all of Cat’s stuff. It was fine, wasn’t like the two of them still had stuff of their to do. The man had an absolute gift for being able to fill every single available nook and crevice with clothing - that was for sure. 

Kochanski picked out an unfinished embroidery-covered jacket, flipped the sunglasses back down over her eyes and checked out how the two pieces looked on her. Lister gave her a small thumbs up before he closed up a box full of folded-up white undershirts. He always felt that she looked good in a blazer.

“I’ve really missed Holly, y’know. Ever since we lost the ship we lost connection to her. It’s been forever.” Lister said as he put the box on a growing pile of battered up storage containers. 

“Two years for us, at the very least several hundred for Holly.” Kryten chirpily informed as he came into the room and placed a large box of supplies onto another pile. 

Lister smiled sheepishly. Holly had already lasted 3 million years alone, a few measly centuries shouldn’t be too much - hopefully. 

 

 

As Starbug eventually drew closer to its destination, everybody eventually made their way back to the cockpit of the ship. There was still the mission of trying to contact Holly again, but for the most part they spent their time flying Starbug as normal. Before long, something huge came up on the readout. Before anybody could properly responce or could do anything to avoid it a bright, aggressive electronic surge ruptured through the ship like a tsunami. All console and displays crashed, then the manual controls like the steering wheels froze up. 

“According to the desk we’ve lost all the engines,” Cat shouted cautiously as he tried to make sense of what seemed to be happening around him. “I think that I read somewhere that can seriously affect your ability to fly.” 

“Console is down, I can’t get a reading on anythin’,” Lister reported rather redundantly. Listers’ arm was one of the mechanical victims, he tried to move it to prod a few leavers to get it back online but it just lied limply in his lap. When the surge of energy went through it ended up shocking him at the connection between it and him, causing him to swear. 

The surge of energy had also momentarily knocked Kryten out, making his body slump lifelessly down into his chair. The rest of the crew didn’t have enough time to properly react before being forced to draw their attention back to their consoles. The ship was still moving from its already established momentum, but everything was out. Cat leaned down in his chair and kicked the side of his steering free from the autopilot, the force of the kick causing the ship to start spinning around in the direction that he kicked. Nobody noticed the spin until Red Dwarf began to appear to fly sideways. Cat tried to get it to stabilize but that soon showed to be impossible to do when your engines and any method of controlling the ship’s movement from the outside are all down. 

Kochanski’s hair started to stand on ends floating around as if it was underwater, the same thing started to happen to Lister’s dreads and dead arm. He pushed it down, but it was rapidly apparent to everybody that not only was the artificial gravity of their ship now down, but nobody had any seatbelts on to keep them in place. 

The ship kept on spinning, the pre-established momentum of the ship only making it speed up in the frictionless deep vacuum of space. Within about 30 seconds everything that wasn’t strapped or bolted down was floating freely in the cockpit. When the artificial gravity of a spinning ship goes down while you’re floating freely like this, something important happens - you don’t spin with it if you were already floating. This is important to note because not only was everybody helplessly floating around, they also couldn’t grab onto anything to bring them back down and regain control of the ship as it was all moving way to fast. Except for Cat that is. Cat managed to stay seated by using his legs to hold onto his bolted down chair for dear life while screaming at the top of his lungs. You could already see the deep imprint of Cat’s manicured claws in the grip of the steering wheel as he struggled for control. 

"Will you monkeys quit floating around and help me!?" Cat shouted looking back at the rest of the crew. 

“What the smeg is happening?!” Lister called out, half in an upside down ball trying to get a good look at the rest of the crew through his legs. 

“We’ve been hit by an EMP or something,” Kochanski called out from the back of the cockpit, sunglasses floating off her head and getting tangled up in a mess of her dark hair as she kept the rest of herself reasonably straight. The two back stations were spinning around in front of her and Kryten like a deadly fan.

“What? Why?” 

“Must be a last-resort defence system - stops pirates from looting abandoned ships, I didn’t even know that Red Dwarf had one.”

“How did you not - why would it do that to us? We’re registered crew on a proper JMC-ship aren’t we?”

“I don’t know! I didn’t send it out for it to hit us now did I?” She responded, annoyance in her voice. 

Lister clenched his teeth and was able to grab onto his side of the console, the force of him joining the spin rendering him dizzy and disoriented. His legs got caught on the side of his chair witch ended up keeping him staight as he wormed his hand across the controls until he reached a radio comm. He bashed the console with his knee and it whimpered back to life like the sputter of an old Hopper. 

“This is the JMC transport ship Starbug 1, we are crew and are not a threat - do you read me?” He attempted to shout into the microphone close to him. “Attempt’ being the right word, with his breathlessness and the sound of Cat’s very vocal yowl of concern off to the side. He banged the console again and repeated the message with more authority. “HOLLY. HOLLY IT’S US, CAN YOU READ US?” He eventually yelled into the mic, but was still only met with dead static from the other line. 

During this time Kochanski had been able to make her way towards Kryten, giving him a kick against the floor to try and get him back awake in the same way that Lister had done to the console. Thankfully it had worked, but Kryten’s panic, once he came back online, didn’t help anyone at all. 

The ship was still flying at full speed towards Red Dwarf, it’s massive size becoming more and more prominent as it happened. They were heading towards the area just above the old meteor that has fused to the side of the ship on impact, an early forecast for their destiny if they couldn’t turn the ship sharp enough to avoid it. Another good thing to know about spaceships is that they don’t usually have wings and deep space doesn’t usually have any air resistance, so you can’t just turn the ship to its side and steer it like an aeroplane. That didn’t stop Cat from at least trying his best to do just that. 

Starbug swerved upwards into an upside-down hanger, top of the ship crashing into the open door with a violent explosion that straightened them out and stopped the spinning. The ship rushed through the minor energy field keeping air in with force, tripping off the alarm. Lister and Kryten got thrown across to the port side of the cockpit with loud thuds, Kryten’s body almost taking out Kochanski's head in the process before she ducked into her station holding onto the head of her chair. 

The bottom line was, they were about to crash and it didn’t look like it would be in one piece.


	2. A Call to Arms - Part 2

Last time we were here Lister, Kochanski, Kryten and the Cat were crashing their ship after being stuck with a weak electromagnetic pulse, losing control of the vessel and smashing half of it into a door. That’s still happening – a slightly forced cliff-hanger slash commercial break by an author who didn’t want to publish a 7500-word chapter wasn’t going to save them from that. 

Regardless, things weren’t really looking up for them. 

For one, Lister and Kryten had just struck a wall at full force with the Cat and Kochanski struggling to keep the ship in one piece. Cat was there man-handling the controls in front of him screaming out cat obscenities though fragmented chirps, purrs, and back-throated ‘mwerps’ that he was thankfully the only one who could understand. 

“Look out!” Kochanski yelled out right before they drove into a giant claw hanging from the ceiling. Cat was able to swerve to avoid the brunt of it, the manoeuvre causing Lister and Kryten to roll back towards the middle of the cockpit. 

And then - impact. Cat managed to crash the ship on its underside with an aggressive thud as it skidded right into a large storage box. In a panicked flurry they all managed to crawl out of the ship holding onto each other, running as their lives depended on it. A large explosion was heard behind them after a few frantic paces, everybody braced themselves as they half-jumped, half fell to avoid the worst of the shock. First the ship blew, second the fuel tanks reacted in a second, bigger explosion. Black smoke and debris rendered the crash site unrecognizable. 

Through the muggy air the dust slowly began to clear, alarms around them blared over the sound of the large hangar door closing. It was an eerie and unwelcoming echo. After a few quiet moments that felt like hours footsteps could be heard, unmistakably so. 

Two workers were the first to appear, slowly coming up to them to see what was going on. Both of them were in full-bodied yellow hazmat suits covered in a mix of dried rock dust and some sort of dried, bluish gloop. Both seemed to be quite startled upon being twenty or so meters away from becoming fatalities and took their helmets off once the dust cleared. Both of them were men that couldn’t be any older than in their mid-30’s. 

Lister put a hand on Kochanski’s shoulder as he tried to catch his frantic breath, the elaborate stitching of Cat’s jacket starting to come loose under his fingers. When he saw that there were people not too far away from him he did a double take, studying their faces. They looked, well, human. He didn’t recognize either of them by face, but human either way. He wanted to run up and hug the workers; being starved from human touch aside from his crew’s, the idea of encountering other humans overtook any sensibility he might have had at that moment. That and being put through a spin cycle and just narrowly surviving a ship crash. Kryten struggled to his feet, adjusting his head back into place with a loud pop. Cat had landed perfectly with a roll and jump to back his feet and was now trying to fix his hair with a fine comb and mirror in his hands. 

There were a few moments of quiet between the two groups. The workers not really knowing what to do or say and the Starbug crew trying to compose themselves, equally unsure of what to do next. Cat moved towards the front and started to sniff the new people before the dust of the crash made him sneeze quite violently into his sleeve. At least it was already dirty from the crash. 

“People,” Lister said to nobody in particular, scanning the huge hangar room around him so he could prove to himself that he was really there. This had to have been some sort of delusion, or maybe even two apprentices of death herself ready to take them away. 

“Are you lot okay?” One of the workers finally asked stepping forward, concern for their wellbeing filling his face and voice. 

“Good heavens! This is wonderful! The old crew are back!” Kryten beamed wildly, complete unaware of how little the rest of the room shared his excitement. 

Before any of them could respond, three more people ran in, this time all guards, guns and all. Two of them grabbed Lister and Kochanski respectfully, forcefully pulling them away from one another. The last of the three took his helmet off, blowing his long blond hair out of his face as he did so. “What the ‘ell is going on here?” He asked in what sounded like an Australian accent, looking over at the Starbug wreckage. 

Starbug had crashed nose first into a large shipping container full of collected mining samples causing the expansive dirt storm that rolled over as soon as they slammed into it. Half of Starbug had been blown off, contents of both it and the container were sprayed around and covered in soot. It was really a miracle that any of them were able to survive the whole ordeal. Since the ship was bigger on the inside than the outside, there was more stuff to break and become debris. Said debris which had come loose during the crash, spilled out of its midsection like a piñata of space junk, the occasional suit or carton of food strewn across the trajectory of the crash. The first two workers had stepped away when the guards came in closer but didn’t decide to leave. The two of them muttered something to each other, but it was too quiet to catch. 

The helmet-less guard seemed to recognize Kochanski with a smirk. Kochanski didn’t seem to recognize him in return, or maybe she was just still too shaken up from being in a ship crash recently. The guard took out a holoreader with a smooth flick of a wrist and projected a warrant of some kind into reading view. “David Lister and Officer Kristine Kochanski, you two are now formally charged with stealing and crashing a Starbug. You both are also charged for flying with no pilot’s licenses and smuggling a stowaway on board. Anything you do or say from now on may be used at a board of enquiry against you.” He read from the screen. He clicked his heels together. “Now, do any of you require any form of aid after your little kerfuffle there?” 

“Yeah, lemon in a really large scotch,” Lister said backhanded, feeling his guard’s grip only grow stronger. His heart kept beating as fast as it could without giving him a stroke. Perhaps it did, with all that just happened he wouldn’t have even noticed.

 

* * *

 

Everybody was swiftly taken from their spots and marched back into the ship. Kryten was the first of the group to be split from the escort. He got taken away while the living crew were taken into the ship. The other three tried to stop it from happening, but didn’t have much time to protest as they were marched away aggressively. The witnesses were second, being told to go and report on what they saw to the ship’s shrink. 

For the living crew, they got marched through corridors and corridors with guards shouting at them to pick up their paces. 

“I know my memory is not all that it used to be, but I distinctly remember there being a whole lot fewer people the last time we were here,” Cat said to the other two, starting to look more tense than usual. 

“It’s like nobody has died, like the ship before the accident, it’s so weird.” Kochanski continued looking around. It all looked, well it looked normal. Sure it looked a bit shitty, but that was still normal. 

“Something doesn’t smell right, none of these people smell right,” Cat said, tongue pressed to one of his canines as he sniffed around. 

“Cat, have you ever smelt any other humans before? Other than Krisie and I.” Lister asked, leaning in. Cat shook his head. Kyten and Rimmer where both machines, so they had their own machine-y smells. Any time Cat had come across a shapeshifter that looked humanoid he didn’t usually have time to sit down and make notes of what those smelt like. Not dying and making sure his suit and hair didn’t get wrecked was more important to him in those moments, thank you very much. 

“What about all the clones on Rimmerworld? Did they smell like anybody here? Like normal, alive humans?” Lister continued as they walked. Those people had been fully human. Yes they were Rimmers, but still human. 

“Rimmer-what?” Kochanski asked joining the little huddle of discussion. 

“Buddy the sooner that whole place is wiped clean from my memory the better,” Cat said with dread in his voice. “Listen, I don’t know what it is, but something is telling me to be on alert, and you should be too.” The Cat finished with an authoritative tone of voice. The others nodded. 

“Anyone got a plan?” Lister asked. 

“Hopefully we will be able to explain our situation, but anything else after that will have to come as we encounter it.” Kochanski reasoned. 

“So what are we gonna say?” Lister began to compose an excuse, “’Oh hiya captain, we’re from three million years in the future after the entire crew died bar us. Here’s our crew; a guy who evolved from a cat, a robot that hasn’t been invented yet and me mum from another reality’? He’s not going to believe any of this.” 

“Starbug’s black box should be able to help with that, the things’ been running for centuries and has the mileage to prove it,” Cat noted. You could almost see the emotion of ‘hey that was kinda smart!’ come across his feline face. Cat liked that feeling. 

“What if we encounter our past selves? Then what are we going to do?” Lister continued with his concerns. He wasn’t able to get a response from either of them before one of the guards stopped and put a hand on Cat’s shoulder. The other two stopped and turned to see what was going on. 

“You’re coming to the science room, whatever you are,” The man said without moving his teeth. He looked away from Cat. “You two are going straight to the Captain’s office. You’ve got a lot to explain.” 

The trio exchanged a worried look before they were forcefully split for the second time. When the rest of the group turned a corner Cat smiled a toothy smile to the gruff man behind him, maybe if he was friendly they wouldn’t hurt him?

 

* * *

 

Lister and Kochanski were marched with haste up flights of stairs all the way up to the drive room. It was a long, tense journey for the two of them. Radio noise came from both of the guards, it was hard to make out, but it sounded like others reporting to a common frequency about the crash and the conditions of the group. 

After the hike, the four of them arrived in the drive room with the guards escorting the two of them though the workspace. One of the men at a counter looked up from his work to check them out before quickly resuming what he was doing. The marching escort turned into a controlled walk of shame down into the captain’s nook of an office. 

There, at the far corner of the offside room, stood non-other than Captain Hollister himself. He was looking outside a large window with his arms crossed behind his back when Lister and Kochanski arrived. They both saluted weakly before the guards let them go and marched a few steps back to guard the doorway. 

The captain’s office was filled with computers and memorabilia of both his carrier and home life. An old photo of him and his wife from when they were both young sat next to a small scale model of the Red Dwarf ship in a diminutive glass dome. The ground about half a meter from the front of the desk was well worn - evidence that a lot of people had visited over a long period of time. Lister ran his foot over the indentions of the floor. He didn’t know how many times he had been there before, but he knew that the last time he had visited was when Frankenstein had been discovered all those years ago. 

It was funny really, this whole adventure had seemed to start and end at this very spot. 

Hollister exhaled as he turned around, looking up and down at both of them. Neither of them were in uniform, for a start. “Do you know what the punishment for something like this is? Stealing and destroying a Starbug shuttle and endangering both the ship and rest of the crew on your little joyride adventure?” He asked both in a sharp Titian-American accent. “You two Lovebirds could have gotten a lot of people killed.” 

“ _Lovebirds_?” Both responded in a uniform protest. Did he know about their 3-week fling all that time ago? Did anybody else on the ship know about that? Of course, it wasn’t protected information, but that was information that the captain didn’t need to have. 

“-And not only that,” The captain continued, completely unfazed at the other’s response, “You’ve somehow acquired dangerous mining equipment and weapons and got them onto the ship, as well as stowed away an undocumented Felis Sapien and some sort of high-end 4000 series mechanoid. I have no idea why or how you’ve managed any of this in such a short amount of time but it’s going to be one hell of a time finding out.” 

“Captain, we have an explanation for all of this.” Kochanski began, not actually having a good explanation. This defence was going to have more holes in it than a good pair of Lister’s underpants.

“You better have.” He said with a stern tone. 

“With all due respect sir, we had all reason to assume that you would be dead right about now,” Lister said sheepishly. 

“What? Have you two planted a bomb on board as well? Have you lost your minds?” Concern filled the captain’s voice. 

Kochanski and Lister stepped back, arms out in defence. “You’re not going to believe any of this, but we think we might, uh, be from the future.” Lister continued. The captain’s face didn’t change. 

“ _What about the bomb?_ ” 

“ _There is no bomb!_ ” Lister replied with strain in his voice. “Look, I’m sorry to be disrespectful to you, sir, but our ship just got hit with some sort of EMP that could have killed us.”

“I don’t have a report of that. I never issued such a command.” 

Lister lifted his limp right arm up with an annoyed huff. “Yeah well, it happened. We tried to contact you lot though all the available channels and we got smeg all!” 

“David, that’s not going to help us.” Kochanski interrupted with her arm in front of him, trying to stop Lister from getting too aggressive. That was the least of what they needed. 

Lister could feel an angry mini-Rimmer take out a tiny report book his subconscious and start to yell profanities about regulation and protocol-ly smeg that probably contained words like ‘millado’ and ‘buckaroo.’ He bit his tongue. “You can’t blame all of this on us, we would have landed fine if that didn’t happen.” Lister kept going as he took a few steps forward. 

Kochanski began to speak, “Captain, I know it sounds crazy, but we really didn’t just ‘go for a careless joyride.’”

Over the next few minutes Kochanski fumbled around explaining the events leading up to the radiation leak with Lister interrupting at points to better elaborate on them. You couldn’t really tell if the captain was believing in any of it, but he was enjoying the story as an overly creative excuse. 

“-And how exactly did this begin?” The captain asked as he tried to put together the timeline of events in his mind.

“We both got put into stasis for smuggling a cat on board,” Lister replied flatly. You could still see the bitter scowl all over his face. 

“There’s a cat on board?”

Lister and Kochanski exchanged looks. “Sort of. The other man that was with us is a Cat.” Lister explained. 

“So, you two got put into stasis for smuggling, him?” Confusion came over the captain’s face. 

“No - no, like, his, great-great-great-something Grandmother.” Lister continued.

“Listen, save this for your trial later.” The captain eventually said holding his palm up to silence the two of them. He really had let this go on for longer than he really should. He had stopped them in the middle of trying to explain the legends of Cloister the Stupid and Korach the Compassionate. 

“Trial?”

“Yes. It’s all protocol. Get your stories straight and we’ll talk again tomorrow.” 

“But sir-“

“Lister, that’s the end of it for now.” 

“Sir, if we do get charged for all this in court, just hypothetically, what’s going to happen to us all? Stasis?” 

The captain sighed. “You’ll most likely be put into the tank for this, but that’s not a call I can make right now until we can assess the whole situation.”

“The Tank? What tank? The Water tank?”

Captain Hollister rolled his yes. “The prison on floor 13. Listen I’m not going to sit here and spoon feed you exposition, re-read a protocol book or something.” 

“Hang on, hang on a second; the ship has a prison?”

“Yes.” Kochanski hissed. She already knew about it and all it entailed and had already started to relay what rules and regulations she could remember that would be applicable to their situation. She wasn’t an expert on it, and it had been many years since any of it was important, but she knew that single-handed destruction of a ship wouldn’t be brushed away with a slap on their wrists and a cut to their pay.

The two of them got dismissed by the captain and their respective guards resumed holding onto them. Kochanski and Lister were taken out of the captain’s office swiftly and split up as they were taken to their respective rooms. The two were able to exchange one last quick glance with one another before it happened. The ship looked the same to Lister - The only thing that was off about it was that there were people everywhere. During this whole second escort that was all that he was able to think about. Crew members, actual smeggin’ crew members! And all alive! People walking around in the old JMC-issued khaki uniforms – the ones that Rimmer used to wear before he started to instead go with the shiny green (and sometimes red, if it clashed too much with Cat’s outfit and he insisted on Rimmer changing it) Space Core standard hologramatic uniform and hat. It even came with a new shiny H. 

Of course this uniform would be introduced much later, and Holly had downloaded it when it was broadcast to all Space Core-affiliated ships in mass in the first half of the 24th century. It wasn’t intended for anybody on Red Dwarf to ever wear it, but at that point in history, the Red Dwarf disaster was just a large black spot in the timeline of JMC that a lot of people would have much rather long moved away from. Finding a way to block out all communications to and from the ship would have just been extra work, and it’s not like there was any reason to need to talk to it anymore other than telling it to keep on its course to get the ship as far away from everybody else as possible. Lister didn’t know where Rimmer got that puffy jacket he wore before he left from, but it didn’t really matter. Smeg, even after all that had happened Lister was still thinking about Rimmer. He felt like a sentimental idiot. 

Lister was put in his old bunk room with a shove, a large bracelet was put around his left wrist to prevent him from leaving the room without getting a hefty dose of electricity running through his body. Both he and Kochanski were given these. The two beds inside of the wall were messy and unmade, some of his old posters and photos were still up, as if he had never left. Lister went over to one of the chairs and sighed, thinking about what was going to happen to everybody now. The day had moved by way too fast for his liking, and he was almost certain that he was going to wake up in his bunk on Starbug at any moment with a bad taste in his mouth. Lister still didn’t have an arm and was about to be put into prison, not much could make this day any worse. 

He stood there spaced out for a good minute or so drumming his fingers on the chair’s back before a very familiar sound of somebody’s steel-capped, JMC-issued regulation work boots entering the room snapped him out of it. “Well, well, well Listey.” Came a snide, sing-songy voice in an all too familiar East Ionian drawl.

Lister’s earlier sentiment was just proven wrong.

 

 

Kochanski was taken through the ship in the other direction past room after room of computers and people working at desks. Officers’ quarters were situated much closer to where they were stationed. 

As she was escorted, she watched the rooms that she passed. People, real actual people, working like they used to do. It was more than a little surreal. People clicking away at keyboards, swiping at screens and talking to one another, time seemed to slow down for her as she observed everybody at work. Kochanski knew this area of the ship very well, it’s where she had worked for years before she was put into stasis. Some of those keyboard strokes felt stiff and rehearsed, everybody was actually focusing on their respective screens or a pile of paperwork instead of finding any reason to do something else. From the tiny glances that she got, it felt almost too perfect. 

Kochanski turned to the large screen on her wall. “Holly, are you there?” She asked into space expecting the face of the ship’s computer to appear. Nothing. She took a few steps closer to the monitor and asked again. No response. “Computer?” Nothing. After a bit of prodding and trying the same commands in Esperanto for a little bit an error message finally appeared, saying that Holly was offline. 

Kochanski took the sunglasses out of her hair and flopped down on her bed in defeat. Something deep inside of her knew something was very, very wrong as Cat’s observation rang again in her memory. _Something doesn’t smell right, none of these people smell right._

If anything, this was not at all how she assumed this day would go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get it? Arms? Cause he lost one? He very clearly doesn’t have an arm in future echoes so fuck it he’s losing it for real in this. I actually have no reason other for that other than that fact but it’s enough to write it in. 
> 
> Ya’ll ready for a clusterfuck of a whole series rewrite? I sure hope ya are.


	3. Back in the Myrtle - Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If they still use VHS tapes and stuff in this version of the future, then floppy drives would also be in use. A ZIP drive is like, that, but a little more. Me telling you this will make sense in a moment.
> 
> I wrote a good chunk of this over the Christmas break at a holiday house with no wifi and an Ipod that had ABBA, They Might be Giants education albums and live Hannah Montana and not much else on it and I think it made me go crazy. It’s an old device and I really should add more onto that thing at some point. This information means nothing to the story ahead - I don’t really know why I’m telling you this.

“The words out they’re going to throw the book at you, Listy! Followed by the bookcase, and the library, brick by smegging brick.” Rimmer said with a cock in his voice that only he could pull off. Lister let go of the chair and turned around, eyes looking Rimmer up and down in disbelief. 

It was Rimmer in his old JMC uniform, the one in beige with the bomber jacket that he wore whenever he had something to hide on his sleeves. His hair was in a tight crew-cut and a very punchable smirk decorated his noticeably H-less face. Rimmer even looked the same as he used to before the accident - considerably younger than he did last time Lister saw him. Lister hadn’t even noticed that the old Rimmer had aged until presented with this new (old?) one. “How’va been going man?” Lister said as he went to greet him with a hug. Rimmer took a few confused steps back in retaliation, causing Lister to stop. 

“What on Io got into you? You can’t fly a Starbug, miladdo! You’re a technician! A zero! A complete and utter nobody!” Rimmer said with a chuckle, listing off insults on his fingers as he continued his train of thought. 

“Cat was the one flying it.” Lister interjected, unable to stop himself, “I was the flight surgeon, ya know? Keeping a lookout for anything upcoming, managing the guns -”

“Starbugs don’t _have_ any guns, Listy. They’re transport ships. It’s all cargo and whatever people leave on them after trips.”

“You don’t know that.” Lister put his left hand thought his hair, holding tightly to the base of his dreads to help compose himself. “Rimmer, this is gonna sound nuts, but the whole crew died, including you.”

“I died?” Rimmer asked with a sharp crack in his voice, folding his arms in a way that showed he knew the other was very wrong. None of the crew appeared all that dead last time he checked. 

“Yeah.” 

“All of them? So what about you?” Rimmer’s foot began to dance away from his leg, but neither man noticed. 

“No, I got put into stasis for smuggling me cat on board. Then there was this big accident where everybody was killed except me.” Lister explained starting to pace around the room. “You caused it when you disrepaired a drive plate years ago.” 

Rimmer seemed to take offence at the idea that he could have caused such a disaster. 

“It’s like everybody has been brought back to life on the ship,” Lister said in a wide mix of emotion. 

“I wasn’t aware that there was any sign that anybody left to be frank with you. So what about your arm? What happened there?” Rimmer gestured to the prosthetic. It was still offline. 

Lister let go of his braids and looked down at his hanging palm. “There was this virus, right? It was either my arm or my li-“

“I get the point, I get the point.” Rimmer dismissed, not wanting to hear an extended sob story. He strolled over to his bunk and sat down. “So, if you got put into stasis, I assume you got let out later?” he asked to humour Lister’s story. 

“Yeah. Problem was it was Cad. II, right? It has a really long half-life.”

“So? How long?” 

“Yeah, well, Holly couldn’t let me out for three million years.” 

“Three million years?” Rimmer said in disbelief, voice going up an octave or two.

“That’s how long it took for the radiation to die down. That’s when I got let out.”

Rimmer made a crumpled-up face that made it hard to figure out if he believed this story or not. “So in three million years’ time you’re going to be let out of stasis, and then break reality to go back in time?”

Lister didn’t really have a response to that other than a small, nonchalant ‘yeah.’

“Look, we don’t really know how we’ve gotten here yet or what exactly is even smeggin’ happening, but we should be able to explain it at our trial.”

“We?” Rimmer asked.

“Kochanski, Cat, me and Kryten. We’re a team.”

Rimmer shot him another look. He had a look that showed he had heard the first name plenty of times, but the second two didn’t seem to ring any bells. “The same Kochanski you dated a couple of weeks back? Why was she with you?”

“She’s from another universe, one where she was the one to be put into stasis instead of me. A month or two ago she accidentally got stuck here and we’ve been trying to get her back home.”

“So time travel _and_ multiple universes? You should write a book, Lister.” He said sarcastically. 

“You have absolutely no idea what we’ve all been through so far.” 

“I can guess. I assume it involves time-travel and multiverses.” Rimmer said as he absent-mindedly looked up at the ceiling. Rimmer was never really into science fiction; a big call for somebody who lived on Io and worked on a spaceship, but those facts never really concerned him as being fiction. It was like somebody in the 21st century talking about VR or the Crouton War; that wasn’t fiction to them. 

It slowly began to dawn on Lister at that moment in time just how much was on that Starbug. The time drive and teleporter, all the GELF and simulant tech they had salvaged, all of the positive virus, and all their weapons. There was also a recently used in-vitro system displaying a recent product with Lister’s exact DNA which would make for some awkward explaining if it ever needed to be explained. The Space core could do a lot with the first two, let’s just leave it at that. 

Knowing what he had to do, Lister turned to face Rimmer. “Rimmer you’ve got to help me get out of here,”

“Why? You can’t run from this. They’ll just catch you and make your sentence longer. Marvellous.” Rimmer rolled over on his bed thinking of the prospect. “Here one day out of your hair for the rest of the trip the next. What’s this? Heaven?” 

“I’m not trying to escape – well I am – but I do need your help.” Lister asked. 

“What? Me?” Rimmer snorted. 

“Who else is going to help me? I'm confined to quarters. The minute I walk through that door, I get enough wattage up my jacksie to light up the whole of Bootle!” 

Rimmer layed down on his bed. “Well, considering what the future has in store for your jacksie, a couple of zillion volts is going to be easy street...” Rimmer replied as smugly as he could have possibly been. He looked back at the other man in the room. “This is all going to go horribly, Lister, you know that right?” 

“It can’t be any worse than being sent to prison.” Lister replied, falling back into the chair behind him. 

 

* * *

 

Kochanski was always a bit of a hugger. She was an affectionate person, and more one to seek comfort in being able to hold onto something. It seemed silly sometimes, pushing towards your 30’s and still being soft enough to have a stuffed animal beside you, but it was a way that helped her to cope. It was a bit like Lister’s guitar and curry obsession, it gave her something to keep herself altogether and reminded her that she was human. 

She had a bear on her old ship that often filled this role named ‘Bobo.’ It had been given to her from an old boyfriend years before she started to work on Red Dwarf as a going away present of sorts. By the time that she had gotten back from that trip he had already started going out with another person, he didn’t stay a boyfriend for very long after that. It wasn’t the memories or the person that was attached to the bear that she cared about, more its physical presence and cheap Titan tourist shop vibe that it gave off. The Bobo in her dimension was old and well-loved after years of love, the one in this one still looked and felt brand new. Why wouldn’t it? Nobody in three million years had even so much as touched the thing. Kochanski held this imposter Bobo close to herself. It was stiff and still smelt like the gift shop that it was purchased at, but it was the best that she could do. It was little things like that reminded her that she was supposed to be dead in this universe – that she didn’t belong here. 

Once Lister, her Lister, became hardlight he was able to fill that void instead. The sad thing is that even as a hardlight projection he still didn’t hold any heat, but that human contact, even if just simulated, was more important to her than that. Kochanski wondered where her Lister was and what he was doing. She wished that she could at least speak to him and the rest of her version of the crew and tell them that she couldn’t be there to re-establish a link if they made one. That was a strong worry that she already had in her mind. 

Being sent to the tank just sounded exactly like what she needed about now. 

 

Before long, Kryten, came into Kochanski’s room, accompanied by a nurse who visibly didn't want to be there. Worry decorated Kryten’s latex face as he sat beside Kochanski. 

“Kryten, hey.” Kochanski said after the nurse left. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, everything’s gone horribly.” He said with a wail in his voice. “I just had the most horrible experience with being psychologically evaluated and with all of my files being examined like there was no tomorrow! It was so embarrassing!” 

“Tell me about it. We barely make it out alive after a ship crash and we find out immediately that I’m going to go on trial. So much for a welcome back to the ship.” Kochanski said with a crock on her shoulder. 

“But if you do go to prison, what’s going to happen to me? I’ll be locked up with you! Put in with the women!” Kryten said, afraid of the near future. 

Kochanski blinked a couple of times. “Wh- why would you be classified as a woman?” 

Kryten’s face seemed to tense up a little more. “Well, it’s because I don’t have a,” his voice went quiet, “penis.” He managed to force out. 

“Kryten, even if you were human I doubt that a lack of a penis is going to play any role in that,” Kochanski said with a sigh trying to keep her composure together for the absurdity of the conversation she was about to have. 

“it’s just – it’s ju-“

Kochanski Looked to the side for a moment as he spoke. “Wait, hang on -” she cut in over him, “Kryten, you can’t be put into prison. You’re a mechanoid. Aren’t there laws about that?” There were definitely laws about that. Not if the computer of any kind, committed a crime under the directions of a human. 

“And if all of this wasn’t bad enough! They also want my permission to repair my corrupted files; Tomorrow afternoon! They’re going to restore my factory settings! All the work that Mr Lister has done, it’s all going to be gone.” Kryten said, not even listening. 

“But your corrupted files are what makes you, you,” Kochanski said with worry in her voice. 

“I’ve been diagnosed as being quirky and unstable!”

“Oh, that’s not any good,” Kochanski said sympathetically, quietly agreeing with that verdict. 

“Spin my nipple-nuts and send me to Alaska! Quirky!? How could they reach a verdict like that? And as for unstable! It makes me so...” Kryten started to glitch up, having to hold himself steady to reset himself. “Darn it, I still haven't got the hang of that emotion, have I?” he said disappointed in himself. 

“What was it supposed to be?”

“Ambivalence. Didn't come out right though, did it? I look like Mister Lister when he's forced to eat fruit.” Kryten said with his spirit dropping further. 

“Well, look, what are you going to do?”

“Why, I have to go along with them, ma'am... I can't say no, they are my superiors.”

“Look, you've got to say no!”

“I can't! They're better than me - I'm - I'm not strong enough!” Kryten’s voice pitched up to the point it made Kochanski wince. She hated when he did that. 

Kochanski looked at Kryten, and then down at Bobo, who had been in her arms this whole time. “Look here’s a tip, if you get scared tomorrow, just remember that you’ve dealt with much worse before. All you have to do is hold your ground and don’t give them your permission. Corrupted or not, you’ve still got your rights.”

“But ma’am-“

“-And if it helps, just remember that none of us are going to give that permission ourselves, is that clear?” 

“Really?”

“Definitely. You’re part of the crew, and we’re going to do everything that we can to save ourselves from this horrid mess.” 

“Thank you,” Kryten said, as a little bit of the weight he was carrying around left his shoulders. An internal alarm set off in Kryten’s head. It was time for him to go back. Kochanski put her hand on Kryten’s knee sympathetically before he was forced by his programming to return back to the robotics lab. 

Kochanski fell back onto her bed with a slow, worried exhale. 

 

* * *

 

Over at the front of the ship, the Captain was working on some paperwork. To the side, he had a cup of some sort of thick purplish liquid that was half drunk. Hollister hadn’t been that hungry ever since the Starbug crash not too long ago. 

Rimmer strolled in, proud of what he had pieced together and ready to report on all of it. He hadn’t been told to do it, but he just had to see what the story was with the runaway third technician. What type of person would he be to pass up being able to rub the upcoming punishment in Lister’s face? A nobody, like Lister. That’s whom. 

After leaving Lister in their shared bunkroom, Rimmer went over some of the repair tickets that had been put in for technicians to fill. Sure enough, a routine driveplate inspection was listed. Had this been the event that was going to, or had killed the crew? It certainly looked like it. If the plate had blown during a simple check-up then Red Dwarf was carrying a nuclear bomb that was sensitive enough to blow at any moment. 

But just between you and I, dear reader, the real reason the plate blew was that after that very check-up Rimmer had decided to try and replace it himself without even alerting to a superior as to what he was doing. Even if it hadn’t of blown he still would have died in a couple of days at the longest due to radiation poisoning from not using any proper safety precautions, so Rimmer’s dead either way. Regardless of the ins and outs of the full drive plate situation, this information would be important for the captain to have, so that’s why he was here. 

After a very long and very formal salute captain Hollister looked up and down at the report he was given and then nodded. “Great work, Rimmer. I’ll get somebody to check up on that.” He said, genuinely impressed. 

“Yes, sir.” Rimmer beamed smugly. 

“There was one other thing that I wanted to ask you, actually.” The captain pushed his work aside and put the report from Rimmer in its place, “Have you talked to Lister yet? He should be in your bunkroom now.” 

“Lister was put into our room just before I went back to it after my shift ended. He started telling a story about the whole crew being dead and he being the only person left in 3 million years’ time. I don’t know if he knows that everybody, including himself, would be dead by then.” 

The captain winced. Rimmer never was fully all there, but his spirit was. In front of his desk was a man who had been working for the Spacecore for longer than he had, but still was no better than the day he first started as a teenager working on a ship that an older brother of his had been able to get him a job on as a favour. That always baffled the captain. “I want you to keep an eye on him when you can, just in case he tries to pull something. Can you do that for me, Rimmer?” 

Rimmer didn’t really know the exact response for that, it felt a little bit like the captain was fishing for more information. “Certainly, sir,” Rimmer said rolling on the balls of his heels. Now that was something he would be able to do. 

Rimmer saluted again and began to leave the office, before stopping himself in his tracks. He was about to talk about how desperate Lister had been for him to cover up whatever was on the ship, but didn’t. If Lister, for some insane reason, trusted Rimmer enough for this job, then it was probably best for him to lay low and keep the conversation going, without the captain possibly intervening - that way he could get the most information out of it. Rimmer smiled back at the captain before marching back to his whatever he should have been doing at that time. 

Maybe Rimmer also just wanted to see where it was going for himself, or maybe he knew a lot more than he was letting on to either. 

 

* * *

 

After a good while of being confined to his bunkroom, Lister had been moved to an anteroom for the next part of his confinement. His right arm had been taken off him with no word on if he would be getting it, or any replacement back. He watched the clock on the wall tick as he awaited his upcoming fate. Both he and Kochanski were to be talked to separately to try and get as much of the story out of them as they could without the two of them conspiring to leave information out or say something that would put the whole situation in their favour. Also, neither of them got any break, it was right into interviewing and psychological examinations for them. Fair enough if you want to get the freshest story out of them, but a breather would be nice every once and awhile. 

As if only there to make everything better, Rimmer had also come, just to talk and gloat to him. He was standing outside of the cell with his head pressed against the bars, enjoying every moment of it. 

“Rimmer man, I’m begging you, you’ve got to help me,” Lister said looking back at the other man. 

“I’m not risking my career and standing for you, Listy. I’m going places!” Rimmer scoffed. 

“Up the ziggurat, lickety-split,” Lister responded putting on a dodgy mock of Rimmer’s accent as he rolled his eyes. 

“Up the ziggurat, lickety-split, precisely! I’m going to pass the engineering exam!” Rimmer said exactly the same way that Lister had done. At that point, he was essentially just doing an impression of his own voice. 

“And become an officer,” Lister contented, still doing his best Rimmer impression as he rolled his eyes. 

“Yes, exactly.” Rimmer said in about 2 octaves higher than normal, doing a bit of an unintentional ‘Gordon Brittas’ voice, winning the battle. 

Lister rolled his eyes again. “Listen man, there’s stuff on the ship that it would be better if it doesn’t get found, I need your help to get rid of it.”

“Stuff like what? I’m not psychic.” Rimmer’s voice went back down to normal. 

“I don’t know man! Use your intuition.” Lister gave a vague overview of the looks of a few things that would cause concern, but Rimmer wasn’t listening. 

“Listy, you can’t even give me a good reason to do any of this for you. I know the rules, I know how much trouble I could get in.” Rimmer began to scheme. The Captain would absolutely love this. 

Lister thought for a little bit. “I could get you promoted.” 

Rimmer snorted. “Preposterous! Absolutely preposterous,” He paused. “How?”

“Information. I’ve seen the crew’s confidential reports. I’ve seen their strengths and weaknesses-“

“How?”

“Well, I used to have run of the whole ship. I’ve seen the crew’s medical records, sessions with the therapist, the works. It’s all on Starbug. The point that I’m trying to make here is, I can make you look like a genius.”

Rimmer looked back at Lister like he was crazy. “I have my principles, Lister. You think you can buy me with promises of power and glory? You really think-“ his demeanour changed, “-okay, I’ll do it. But you’ll have to prove it to me first.”

“You’re on.”

“Get me promoted.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Okay, deal.”

“Get a copy of the files that you want while you’re down there, and then hide stuff in our room before a clean-up crew comes or something.”

Rimmer marched back into the hallway. Lister checked the clock on the wall again. 

 

* * *

 

Rimmer made his way to what was left of the fallen Starbug. It was mostly intact, but even he could tell that it wasn’t space worthy anymore. Nobody was around, so he ducked under the caution tape and began to explore. Boxes and clothing dotted down the ships’ centre, strange machines stored away, it was a treasure trove that made him excited for what he might find. 

He sat at one of the front seats and pressed a few buttons. The monitor responded with a pathetic whimper of compliance as Rimmer put a dark grey zip disk into a slot to the side. That was Lister’s side of the agreement gathered, now to get what Rimmer wanted in return. Rimmer mucked around on the computer for a little bit more, ship logs and flight reports spewed out all over and around the screen. It looked as if everything Lister had been talking about was more or less true. 

Rimmer ejected the zip with the copy of the black box into his pocket and put a different one in the slot. He dug a little deeper through the couple files until he found the folder of crew files deep down in the remove archive of the ship’s computer. It was going to take a considerable amount of time to copy the set overdue to data being so compressed, so he got up and had a bit more of a look around. 

A reflective briefcase on a shelf caught Rimmer’s attention. Inside it was padded with small vials of colourful liquid on display. Each had a label stuck onto the side. ‘Sexual magnetism’ in red, ‘luck’ in blue, the list went on. He grabbed the first two and held them into the light. Both appeared to be some sort of serums. The console pinged, bringing him back to the task at hand. 

This was the _exact thing_ that the captain would love to know about. Lister was hiding something, and was so concerned with the state and content of this ship that he was willing to bribe for it. it was perfect. It was a shame then when Rimmer forgot the second zip drive in the console. It was even more of a shame when you remember that it had his name written on it and a copy of highly restricted information loaded right onto it for anybody to pick and see for themselves exactly what he had done. 

 

* * *

 

Rimmer ducked back to where Lister was being kept. With two of the vials and a backup of the Starbug’s log in his trouser pocket. He wasn’t actually allowed to be here, but was flaunting what the captain had asked of him as an excuse to the guard who honestly didn’t care what Rimmer did. 

“The plan's working, Listy. Operation Get Rimmer Officerhood, Power and Eminence, or G.R.O.P.E. for short, is bang on course.” Rimmer beamed as he strolled in. 

“How did’ya go man?” Lister said when Rimmer came back into his view. 

“What are these?” Rimmer cut in while holding the two vials of positive viruses up at the cell. 

Lister got up from his bench “Positive viruses. We got them from this crazy scientist a while back. The red one is sexual magnetism and the blue one is luck.”

“Positive viruses?” Rimmer asked. 

Lister picked the blue one out Rimmer’s hand. “We hadn’t really had a chance to test that one out considering our crew situation,” He gestured to the red one with the blue one like a conducting wand, “- but the luck virus is what it say on the tin, well until your body’s natural defences kick in.”

“So, that gives you, luck?” Rimmer said looking deeply at the thick syrup. 

“Yeah man. That would be perfect right now.” You could start to see the expression on Lister’s face light right up as he handled the leaky vial. over time the virus had leaked out of it’s tube and had congealed in a goop around the lid. 

“What are you going to do with it?” Rimmer said, taking the tube away from Lister. 

“If I’m infected, I could get the pin pad figured out on these cuffs, and then get out of here.” Lister looked back at his arm sheepishly, “And maybe also figure out how to even put it in.”

“So all that you have to do is just ingest it?” Rimmer asked moving the red vial around in his hand. 

You could practically see the life drain out of Lister as he watched the cogs turn in Rimmer’s mind. “Don’t do it, man.” He said like a disappointed parent. “I know what you’re going to do and I’m telling you now, don’t.” 

Rimmer took a long swig of the red vial. Lister put his face in his elbow and exhaled, not wanting to look. _Of-smegging-course he was going to pull something like this._

“You don’t have a shred of decency left in you, do you?”

“Bold of you to assume that I had any to begin with.” Rimmer replied as he walked back down the corridor, already starting to feel different. A small group of female co-workers turned as he walked past, greeting him with intrigued smiles. Rimmer gave them all a small salute and a smile. Another woman that he passed gave him the same look, he just smiled excitedly back. 

_The world loves a bastard._


	4. Back in the Myrtle - Part 2

The Cat laid on one of the science room beds with a scratchy teal blanket over his naked body. His clothes sat on coat hangers over in another room spread across several dry cleaning bags - it was the only way the employees were able to get him to lie-down and comply with the testings that they wanted to do without using too much force. The only thing that cat still had on him was his hair tie keeping his hair back and his studded earrings. 

It had turned out the ship’s sensors had detected a non-human life form when he got out of the Starbug, and well, they weren’t wrong. Once he had been taken to the science room, Cat had been put under strict medical observation. Tests were run on him ranging from an X-ray to plain old DNA testing as the small team of medical personnel tried to figure out what in Cloister’s name he even was. 

Right now Captain Hollister was in the room, looking over medical results with one of the lead scientists condensing the results for him. 

“-Actually, the DNA that we took appears to show that this man is some sort of housecat.”

“Cat? Like, the little furry animal?” the captain made a sort of, ‘paw’ motion with his hand. 

“Yes, that’s right.”

“He looks human to me.” The captain said, looking back at Cat as he rested on the bed with his arms behind his head. Cat gave him a little wave. 

“Any human-ness that we see looks to be the result of convergent evolution, that’s the only way I can think to describe it.” The scientist replied. 

_‘The other man that was with them is a Cat.’_ The captain repeated to himself quietly. “So, a ‘human’ who evolved from a Cat?” He continued to the lab-coated woman beside him. 

“That seems to be the case, yes.” She confirmed. 

The two of them began to talk to each other for a little bit more, but Cat wasn’t able to catch any of it. They seemed concerned about something, but that’s to be expected. The captain left with a nod. The doctor turned back to Cat on the bed. Cat just smiled in response with the blanket still at his neck.

 

Once it was just the two of them again she walked over to a shelf and took a flat packet of clothing off it with a ‘SIZE M - MENS’ printed on it. She turned back to Cat and gave it to him. He sniffed it, read the rest of the printing, and sneered. 

“Beige? Are you crazy, lady?” The cat responded offended at the mere idea of what she was implying. 

“Look,” She began, “You’re an unrequested stowaway. It’s either something like this or a floor 13 jumpsuit until the higher-ups know what to do with you. Plus, you’ll blend in a bit more.” The way she said ‘blend in’ didn’t sound like she had much confidence in his usual attire. The scientist couldn’t seem to tell if she was meant to speak to him like an alien species, a stray animal that wandered in through the doorway or a convicted criminal. So instead of deciding on a tone, she sort of spoke to him in a condescending mix of the three. 

“You should get all of your stuff back at the end of the trial.” 

“Trial?”

“Yes. Your cohorts will be tried for theft and destruction of a Starbug, plus whatever other charges those two are found guilty of; including you.” 

Cat bit his lip. Given what he had to work with he thought he landed the Starbug pretty well. It’s not like anybody died or anything. 

The doctor pulled a curtain around the bed to let Cat get changed. He looked at the beige shirt and slightly darker beige pants he was given with disgust. Both felt like cheap cotton, bleah. It didn’t have a tie or anything else, just those two pieces. 

_Help you blend in more, hey? Now that wasn’t a bad idea._

Cat forced himself into the change of clothing. It was ill-fitting and baggy, not like the slim fitting attire that he was used to. 

The whole thing was almost giving him Duane Dibbley flashbacks. It should have been a punishable offence to do something like this to him. He picked up his boots from the side of the bed and put them on. There was an outline of the doctor at one side of the curtains, but none on the other. Being careful not be seen, he put his head through the gap. It wasn’t closed up, and there was nobody in between the curtain and that doorway. Now was his chance.

 

Cat ended up moving through the corridors with as much grace as he could muster. He felt like Rimmer in the scratchy, baggy excuse for a uniform. No wonder he used to be such a smegpot. He closed his mouth to hide his teeth and walked passed another person in uniform. He straightened up his posture, but they didn’t acholeddge him any further than walking out of his way. Usually, Cat would be offended by that, but if he was going to be ignored it might as well be when he’s dressed like this. Being ignored would be a good thing right now. 

As he turned a corner, Cat almost bumped into one of the old crewmembers, Cat thought she was really beautiful, and his pace slowed down as he walked away from her checking her out. She had a large folder of paperwork on her, and quickly noticed that she was being looked at and looked back. Cat averted his eyes, but the damage was already done. “Can I, help you?” She replied with caution eyeing him up and down. She reminded him a little bit of Kochanski, only more bubbly and with an accent that Cat couldn’t quite work out, but it sounded like none of the voices that any of the rest of his crew spoke in. For all of you reading at home, it was Scottish. 

_Think. Think. Think. Think. Think._

Cat needed something to say and fast. Something that wouldn’t put a target on him. Something that he could use to get away from her. “Uh, would you by any chance know where the officers’ quarters would be?” 

_Twonk._

The lady looked him up and down for a second. Cat coughed into his fist. “I’m, uh, new here, and I was supposed to be meeting somebody there.” He smiled as friendly as he could putting on a confident voice, cat-like teeth on full display. He had been doing a lot of smiling like that today already. 

Her demeanour seemed to relax a bit. “Oh, I’m actually going up to the drive room now, I can take you there if you want, it’s on the way.” She answered in a relaxed voice. 

Cat didn’t really know how to respond other than to nod and let her take him towards an X-press lift. 

After they boarded the elevator there was silence between the two of them. Cat wanted to flirt to her badly, but knew that he would be putting himself at risk of being found out and taken back. How fair is that? Stuck in a confined space with a pretty woman and not being able to do anything with it? C’mon. He had his rights. 

“So, what do you do?” The woman asked as almost as if she could tell exactly what he was thinking. 

Cat looked back at her. Well, if he was going to go down this route he might as well do something with it. “I’m a pilot.” He said with confidence. He wasn’t wrong about that. 

“Oh really? Your uniform doesn’t have any tags on it, Mr?”

“My friends call me ‘Cat’, and I haven’t had any tags made up yet.” Cat replied patting his left peck where a rank label would normally be sewn into. He caught his reflection in the wall of the lift, without a suit or something in black vinyl he was almost unrecognisable. Not only was he dressed like this, but he was also dressed like this around a woman. Cat had never made a promise before, but he promised himself to never wear a uniform, or beige again.

The woman chucked a little. “A pilot, huh? I didn’t know that we had any new pilots joining our crew.” 

“It’s a bit of, uh, work placement, get a feel for the workforce, and know the ins and outs of a big ship like this.” Cat had absolutely no idea what he was saying, just going off the hope that if he sounded like he did it would be enough. Cat needed a good reason to be then and there. He could pass as a human fine, no sweat, no pressure. “I know a few people who worked here already, and I thought I might go and say hi.” 

Despite the clear failed attempt to lie, she seemed to take it as fact. The elevator came to a creaking stop. “Floor 456, B-deck, Officers’ quarters and recordation rooms. Thank you.” It chirped in an accent not too far removed from Lister’s. The lady nudged her head to the side to signal that this was his stop. 

“Do you know what room you have to head to now?” The woman said as she held the door open. Her stop still to come. Cat nodded quickly walking away backwards with his arms to his side. If Officer BB was here he could smell her out, or sneak back down to the cargo bay. “I know you’re still settling in, but if you’re free Saturday night I’ll be down by the bar then.” She said catching him with a smile before Cat walked too far away. He grinned back and spun around with his eyes dilating and wide smile still plastered on his face. 

“I’ll see you then, baby.” He called over his shoulder feeling excited at the prospect. She smiled, and the elevator door closed. He couldn’t believe it – He had just gotten a date! That’s pure cat charm right there. 

Too bad he didn’t catch her name, but he wouldn’t ever forget her smell. That was enough.

* * *

 

The cat made his way down the corridor, still feeling a rush of energy. He passed two people playing ping-pong in white singlets, another group of workers chatting with a pair of colourful dispensing machines. There was a couple making out in their room with the door open, and somebody was watching sports while throwing darts at a target right above the screen in the room opposite it. Cat kept on going at a steady pace until he found the room that smelt the most of Kochanski. 

The target of his search was lying on her bed when Cat walked in. “I heard that you’re gonna get thrown in the slammer.” He said as he went over to her. Kochanski had turned her head excitedly when he came in, but the rest of her body barely moved. 

“Yep. They’re also going to wipe Kryten, so that’s even better.”

“You gonna let that happen?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Good plan.”

“Thanks. How exactly I’m going to be able to do that is still unknown, considering the fact that I can’t even leave the room.” She said as she lifted her body up, her arm out for Cat to sniff. Cat did just that – it smelt like a metal bracelet alright. 

“Where’s the jailhouse?” Cat asked as he sat down on a chair by a white table. 

“There’s one on the ship, floor 13. Do you know about the city of –“ She rolled a sound in her mouth with a questioning inflexion, “- My version of you did.” 

Cat thought about the old cat city in question and nodded. It actually made a lot of sense for that site to have originally been a prison, what with all the cages and small rooms and just general bad vibes it always gave off. There was no actual English word for the place other than a later nickname for the location that could be translated to ‘Kinda shit old place the hat wars started in.’ That was the problem with the cat language. The way you signed your name in cat was to rub your forehead on the paper, and the ship was so small (compared to something like a country or planet) that most things didn’t even need a word for because everybody knew what you were talking about. Verbal cat was pretty much just shorthand. 

Kochanski got out of her bed, put Bobo down, and sat at the chair opposite Cat. “Hey Cat,” Kochanski asked looking at her bracelet, “would you have any sort of tweezers or something on you by any freak chance?” 

“Of course I do,” Cat replied taking out an elaborate, leather-walleted manicure set out of his breast pocket, “I’m not an animal.” 

Kochanski began to pick the lock attached to her with a long nail file. “I’m surprised that they let you walk around like this without anybody keeping an eye on you.”

“They didn’t. They should know that you can’t contain a cat like me.”

“They can still dress one, by the looks of it.” 

“Hey – desperate times call for desperate measures.” Cat snapped. At least he wasn’t dressed as a GELF like when the two of them had to do back when they all had to try and get a new head for Kryten. He’d spent so long on those costumes it was almost silly. 

Kochanski clicked off the bracelet, chucked it on the table and rubbed her wrist. 

“So, ya got a plan?” Cat asked. 

“Get Kryten before he’s wiped, get David, and get the hell out of here.”

“How? The ship’s totalled. You saw the explosion. We barely made it out of there alive.” 

“There are dozens more in the docs, we can hop on one of the midgets and take off.” 

“Seems risky, even for us. I hate to be a downer here but I’m not quite sure that’s the best thing to do.”

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life as a lab rat?”

“Oh Cloister no,” Cat replied, horrified at the idea. 

“’Cause, if we go into this trial with our crackpot, bad-sci-fi level story, that’s what going to happen. I’m not losing both my position and serving a couple of years locked away in some pathetic excuse for a ship prison over something out of my control like this.” Kochanski stood up and began to pace to her bunk and back. “And even if it does all get believed in, what’s in store for us? Cat, I’m from another smegging dimension. Not to mention that there is – well was – a working time machine on that ship. We would have just walked into some level of bureaucratic hell. It would be worse than prison.” She sat back down. “And besides, if we are in the past, who knows’ what we’ve messed up by just being here.”

“You’ve got good points there,” Cat said, taking in all that she had said. 

“I didn’t become an officer overnight.” Kochanski replied with lacklustre jazz hands in a ‘ta-da’ motion. 

“So get the robot, get dormouse cheeks, get my clothes, and get the hell out of here?”

“I can’t promise you the third one, but we can try our best.” 

The two of them left Kochanski’s quarters carefully and jumped into the same elevator that Cat had come up in. Kochanski pressed the buttons needed to take them to the robotics area of the ship and they were off.

 

* * *

 

Lister smooshed his hand all over his face in an extended facepalm before he collapsed back onto the bench behind him. Rimmer was a weaselly and pathetic excuse for a man that he had just handed the whole briefcase of positive viruses over to. If the old Rimmer was with him right now he would just be laughing his H off at him. 

But then again, exactly what the hell was he even expecting to happen? 

Lister’s hand moved down to his mouth before a sweet taste took him by surprise. Maybe this wasn’t so much of a total smeg up after all. Lister put two of his fingers in his mouth. it was a sweet taste and one that he knew quite well.

After not very long he could feel the luck virus start to take effect. It was a sloshy wave of energy, but it was definitely the right feeling. 

It was lucky for Lister that he had been given a faulty bracelet, as it didn’t take him that much force to be able to get it off. It fell to the floor un-surreptitiously and he began to mess around with the keypad on the wall just in arms reach of the bars, causing them all to collapse back into the wall. 

“Sheer luck,” Lister said as he weaved his way out of the room. 

Luckily for him, the next guard was late for the changeover, and the first not knowing this, had taken off on his smoke break already. It was also lucky that the person tasked with interviewing him had been held up with something, and the main security camera that was watching him had a fault, causing it to record over old footage instead of streaming it to that department like it should have – making it so nobody saw him leave. 

Being careful not to run into anybody Lister made his way to the first lift that he saw. He pressed the lift button to go down to the cargo bay.

 

* * *

 

Kochanski and Cat stood around in the elevator and listened to the quiet steel-drum music. It wasn’t an unpleasant moment, but more of one with both of them not having anything to talk about. The elevator pinged after a while, and the doors opened up. And - with some freak luck, Lister was the one to step in. Kochanski and cat smiled, happy to see a familiar face. 

“Hey, guys!” Lister said as the affection was shared. 

“David! What the hell are you doing here?” Kochanski said, happy to see him. 

“Luck virus,” Lister answered. 

Kochanski seemed to pipe up even more with excitement. “You have the luck virus on you?”

Lister looked down at his hand. “No, but I was able to get a little bit on my finger when I touched the vial just before. Took it to get out of the anteroom and it must still be in effect.” He looked at the other two, and then squinted at the man in beige that he shared the elevator with. 

Cat paused for a moment before pulling down his shirt. “This is between us three only, got it?” He said coldly. 

“So you just, put in any code that you felt like, and the Luck virus made you pick the right one? That’s Brilliant.” Kochanski said. 

“Yeah, just rubbed me finger over the top of the tube,” Lister said looking down at his hand. 

“How did you get it?” Kochanski said intrigued. “Do you keep it on you?” 

Lister looked to the floor. “Rimmer.” He admitted. 

“Rimmer? Like the guy who killed everybody? What was he doing with them?”

“I sorta told him about what’s been happening, Rimmer got a copy of all the crew’s personal files and the positive viruses and legged it.” 

Kochanski blurred her cheeks. “So where is he now?” she asked, not really wanting to hear the answer. 

“My guess is that Rimmer’s found the officers’ club and has every female staff member rolling all over him after drinking a bottles worth of the sexual magnetism virus,” Lister replied. Kochanski gave a look of general disgust. Cat began to dream of that very situation, but with him instead of Rimmer. 

The elevator door pinged and opened up again, everybody turned their attention towards it. 

Speak of the devil indeed. 

Rimmer was panting, looking like he had been through utter shit. His hair and uniform were all messed up and his eyes wide open. His jacket was nowhere to be seen, knowing how much it would have smelt like him - that was probably a good thing. 

“Listy, I have made a horrible mistake,” He said through heavy breaths, holding onto the elevator doors for dear life. The other three didn’t have much of a choice besides stepping back and letting him in. 

Lister exhaled. Looks like his luck had worn off already. 

Sometimes, it turns out that self-introducing a deadly virus to your system that makes your body excrete a powerful pheromone strong enough to turn on anyone around you to the point of not being able to think, can be a really bad idea. A really bad and also kinda, ya know, rape-y idea. Rimmer had learnt this the hard way, having spent most of this very short time between now and then avoiding some people like the plague and having to forcefully stop others from getting close. Most of his day had been spent running away, even more than usual. It doesn't just affect women, the virus was affecting everybody that he encountered in the same way. 

Not only did it make him feel sick, but also like he was doing something really, really wrong. Mostly because he was, but he also was feeling a normal amount of general sickness as his body dealt with the new virus. Rimmer didn’t think he was that bad of a person, and in hindsight should have really thought of the implications of the whole idea a little more than he did. 

Kochanski looked Rimmer up and down. So this was the man that was chosen to be revived as a hologram for Lister? Rimmer clearly ended up meaning a lot to him if he also ended up dreaming about him so much. You don’t dream about somebody for no reason, you know. And what a reason; the taller, unbelievably fit frame and broad shoulders that didn’t quite fit in his uniform, the wild curly auburn hair, the-

Wait a fucking minute. Kochanski may have been away from other people for a long time, but there was no chance that this was actually happening. This was, you know, Rimmer. Everybody on the ship and then some knew what a total unlovable, intolerable smeghead he was. She had seen the Rimmer Experience- she knew what he was like. So what was going on with her? Even if he wasn’t all of these things, he still wouldn’t be her type. She looked over to Lister beside her, and her suspicions were confirmed.

Lister was starting to blush and breath deeper than normal, you could tell by the way he was standing so restlessly that something was up. If Kochanski was right, it was the same thing happening to her. The elevator chugged downwards as the passengers stood in the sharp, sexual-tension-filled silence. Rimmer was still infected, and they could all tell. 

Lister was the one to speak first. “Rimmer man, how much of that did you take?” He said through a blushed face. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rimmer said defensively, still trying to catch his breath from his mad sprint to the elevator. 

_“Rimmer.”_

“About, arg, about a shot’s worth? I wasn’t really thinking about getting measuring cups out at the time.” He responded getting frustrated with all of the questions being thrown his way. 

Three sets of human eyes made their way over to Cat who was sitting down on one of the cushioned seats. “Cats and Monkeys express that part of themselves differently, if you think I’m going to go gaga for that fine example of _‘the peak of the human evolution’_ over there then you’ve got another thing coming. I still have my standards.” The Cat replied picking at his cubicles with his thumb. 

Rimmer put his hands on his knees and slumped to the floor in defeat. 

Cat took in a long inhale through his nose. All he could smell was Lister and Kochanski still affected by the sexual magnetism virus. Humans in heat, now that was an interesting sight. Not a nice sight, but something to experience once in a lifetime to say that you have experienced it. 

Kochanski whistled, and then clicked her tongue. “So, um, sorry to be a bit redundant here, but why did you tell him about all of this in the first place?”

Lister sort of evaded the question. “I asked him to help me, but that didn’t really go as planned.”

"And, you thought it would?" Kochanski said, her glare only getting stronger. 

"Look, I’ll admit that using the confidential crew files to bribe Rimmer wasn't one of me better ideas but-" 

_"You did what?!"_ Kochanski's usually fair complexioned face turning even lighter. 

"Well what else was I 'sposed ta do, huh?" Lister said, accent thickening from exasperation. "Sit there and twiddle me thumbs till we go to trial?"

"I understand your distress, David." Kochanski began, in a tone reminiscent of a mother scolding her child. The irony of that might be humorous if things weren't so dire. 

Lister sighed, and leaned his head back against the wall. "I know, I know. Hindsight's 20-20 I suppose." 

"Todhunter was certainly admiring the sight of mine." Rimmer griped, life still drained out of him. 

"Shut up, Rimmeh." Lister snapped at the man on the ground. 

Kochanski looked back at Lister in the same way a grown man with a shotgun in hand might look at his best mate the second he caught him sleeping with his teenage daughter. “David, having confidential files like that can be up to a two-year sentence in the bridge.” She said quietly.

“What? Why would that be as serious as stealing and crashing a Starbug?” Lister asked, slightly puzzled. 

“JMC are afraid of Lawsuits. This is serious stuff.” Kochanski responded. “Somebody is going to see that that information has been copied over and our charges could be doubled. 

The Elevator was still going down. The whirr of its mechanics played as background noise. Oh and, they were both still quite horny. that didn’t make the situation any better. 

Rimmer’s slim hand came up from the floor in front of them. If this was a movie or TV show it would have come up into the centre of the frame in a moment of pique comedic timing. Kochanski’s and Lister’s eyes moved down. In his hand was the zip drive that he had on him, the realization that it was instead the backup of the black box backup didn’t even cross his mind at the time. “Here.” He said from the floor. “Just take it back if it’s so important.” 

“Oh no, you dug this hole, you can wallow in it. We have enough problems right now without this being one of them.” Kochanski said with a snarl much in the same way Lister had done before. Rimmer retreated the disk and put it back in his pocket. 

“So, what were you two doing in the elevator in the first place?” Lister asked trying to change the conversation, still dumbfounded at the fact, luck virus or not, that they were all here. 

“Officer BB and I are going to get Kryten back and hightail out of here.” Cat replied. 

“What about me?” Lister said slightly offended that there was no plan to rescue him. 

“No need, you’re already here,” Kochanski replied putting a hand on Lister’s shoulder. “Is that a new shirt?”

“No, not really. Had it for a while now.”

“Oh,” Kochanski said quietly. there was another pause as the elevator kept chugging downwards. The music seemed to grow louder. 

“Look,” Lister exhaled after swallowing hard, “I didn’t really have much time to think this over. He was there at the time and it just made sense. If you say it out loud like that it does sounds like an awful plan. What more do you want from me?” 

“I want to come with you,” Rimmer said through the thick tension, still on the floor. The other’s turned towards him. 

“What?” Kochanski asked. 

“I said, I want to come with you,” Rimmer repeated, standing up like a newborn Snugiraffe calf. “Wherever you lot are going now I want to join you.” 

Kochanski laughed a sarcastic laugh though her teeth. “Listen, I hate to judge you so quickly, but at the first sign of personal gain you threw a simple job and any trust you were given right into the ship’s engine.”

“Well, it is Rimmer.” Cat said as he fixed up his eyebrows. Lister agreed with a reluctant shug. 

“Listen-,” Rimmer tried to rebut to no avail. 

“Let’s just focus on the task at hand before we start adding crewmembers.” Kochanski said as they finally neared their destination. She knew that she would be stuck with him from now on, she could feel it. 

“Right.” the other three said in varying degrees of compliance. 

 

* * *

 

“He’s on this floor, let’s get outta’ here.” Lister said as the elevator doors opened up and its four passengers walked out into the quiet hallway. Robotics was on this floor, but nobody else was. Of course everybody besides Rimmer didn’t notice because the three of them had been so used to a quiet ship it didn’t faze them, and Rimmer didn’t want to make things worse for him by bringing up. 

The blond guard from before was leaning against a corridor wall, smoking a cigarette. “If you two planned to leave it would be better to put in the paperwork for your resignation; saves up some time later.” He chirped when the group walked past him. 

They all stopped, slightly dumbfounded. 

“You cunts do know that the whole ship is under surveillance, right? Do you honestly think that you lot wouldn’t be watched with as tight of an eye as possible?” the guard chuckled after blowing a smoke ring. He dropped the cigarette and squashed it under his boot. The guard took out his radio and began fiddle around with mockingly. His accent shifted to something more like Rimmers’ or Kochanski’s. “Ah Yes, Let’s Just Walk Out Of the Ship. That Won’t Raise A Flag Bigger and Redder Than the Smegging Ship Itself.” 

It didn’t take very long the guard to get on his radio again and for the quartet to be arrested, again. It also didn’t take much longer for them to all be sent to their own holding cells with proper security keeping them inside this time. 

Game over, lose a life and go back to square one.

 

* * *

 

Later on, quite a while after the rest of this chapter was over, Kryten was plugged into a main server and standing in a containment unit. 

The mechanic looked over her screen and at the mechanic plugged in behind it. After rambling on and on and showing sure signs of major file corruption, it would decide that it would be given a full factory reset. Kryten couldn’t do anything to stop it, all he could do was wait for a miracle to happen. 

The data doctor menu came up. 

“Hello. I'm the Data Doctor. If you would like me to examine your hard disk press 'Examine'” The character of John Warburton spoke in a bit of a silly voice. “Your mechanoid appears to have developed the following rogue emotions: affection, arrogance, envy, guilt, humour, insecurity, petulance, possessiveness, snobbery, and love. If you would like to eradicate these emotions from his database, press 'Fix'.” The mechanic pressed the allocated button on her screen, Kryten’s body slumped down. 

“Please reboot your mechanoid.” The voice came back after a couple of minutes of Kryten going under a full reset. “All bad line blocks and corrupted personality disks have now been fixed. His personality has now been restored to its factory settings. Thank you for your loyalty to Diva Droid Interplanetary, we hope you have a good day.” 

As if she had rewound a tape Kyten was back to his factory settings. 

Kryten slowly came back to life. Internal diagnostics, update screens, and other suck computing annoyances came though his vision. The mechanic asked who he was to make sure he was up and running again.

“My name is Kryten, I am programmed to serve. Can I be of service?” Kryten said in a calm, butler-esk voice that wasn’t too far removed from when he used to be of serves on the Nova 5. 

“Bring me a coffee, please, Kryten.” The woman replied. 

“Certainly, ma'am.”

“Then you may scrub the floor.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Kryten said contently. 

Are you happy, Kryten?”

“I have no understanding of human emotions, ma'am. I am programmed to serve.” Kryten said peacefully. 

The mechanic smiled. “Excellent. I already have so much work for you to do.”

 

* * *

 

A small group of workers made their way towards the Starbug, intrigued about what they might find. this was a cleanup job ordered by the captain himself. Over time the shipwreck was slowly cleared box by box. it was a long job. 

One of the workers made his way over to the console of the ship, an ejected zip disk caught his attention. It looked brand new, the words “Property of Arnold J Rimmer (B.S.C, S.S.C)” were written on it in the fine liner. He slung his gizmo over and rested it on his knee and inserted the disk. The second man walked over to the other to see what was going on. Loaded onto the disk was copies of crew files - subfolders of medical records, transcripts of therapy sessions, their food ordering history, everything. The properties of the files showed they had been copied not too long ago, and the console itself was able to verify it. It was basically what Kochanski was afraid of, only it had come true. 

Attention was then turned towards a briefcase that was open on a pile of rubble. It had a good selection of tubes on display with a few spaces for more. One opened and sniffed a vial before clenching up from the smell. 

A small murmur was shared around the crash site, if their theory on what these were was correct, then their regular jobs were just about to get so much easier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen I hate ‘yeah mate let’s just reuse the whole script in our fanfiction’ as much as the next guy, but trust me it’s all out of my system now. So, crews in prison, no way to contact any other ship and Rimmer seems awfully complicit with their plan. Let’s see where this goes from here. 
> 
> Thanks again so much to thecowboyarthistorian for all of your help, couldn’t have been able to do this without ya, man.


	5. Thursday Lunch Down on Floor 13

“Are you still not talking to me? It's unbelievably childish, y' know.” Lister asked from on top of his bunk. He had a magazine in one hand and a pen in the other. He had just finished filling in a personality quiz about sex lives for Rimmer and later started reading out the gossip sections about some Mars actress who got artificial boobs with a different AI in each Breast; marvelous stuff. After the complete and utter disaster of their trial, he and Rimmer had been put in the same cell. Both considered that to be part of their respective punishments. 

“I bet I can make you talk,” Lister said jumping down from his bunk with a heavy thud. “Twenty Dollars Pounds says I can get you to speak in the next minute.” Lister clicked the pen in Rimmer’s face. “Alright, if I’m on, say nothing.” 

Rimmer didn’t respond. He kept reading. He turned the book upside down and looked at something with a raised eyebrow. The book was one about 21st-century vintage cars - the ones that were made to be fully automatic before they all rebelled. He actually wasn’t reading it, he hadn’t been able to with Lister constantly squawking in his ear like a hungry baby parrot. Rimmer had been trying to read the same paragraph for the last half hour now. The pen in his face kept on being clicked. 

Lister began to rock on the chair, causing it to squeak. Squeak, click, squeak, click, and then for the hell of it, a double squeak. Rimmer didn’t budge. 

“ _I want to run naked through your underwear. I want to feel our bodies become one under the passion of the European moonlight_.” Lister purred, shoulders rotating around. Usually, Rimmer was so insecure about this sort of thing. Still no response. 

Lister thought for a moment. A large grin moved over his face in slow-motion. 

He leaned in close enough for the two to be able to smell each other. He cleared his throat, and got ready to say every syllable in his trump card as clear and loud as possible into the other man’s face. 

“Gah-“No response. Lister moved in even closer. 

“-Spach-“ Rimmer’s eyes began to dart around the page. The two looked like they were about to kiss. 

“-Cho-“

“Will you SHUT UP.” Rimmer finally snapped in a roar, bumping lister’s head as he did so. 

“What did I tell you! Twenty big ones!” Lister said in celebration, rubbing his own head as he did so. That had really hurt, like banging your head on a statue, but Lister didn’t seem to care. 

“I’ve been listening to you whittling on now for what seems like two ice ages!” Rimmer yelled, “My mind is so numb and brain-dead I feel like I've just attended a three-day seminar entitled "The Future of Plumbing". Have you any idea how irritating you've just been? You're a master! There are things you could teach to tropical skin diseases!” Rimmer sounded like he was about to break down in tears. He rubbed his own head furiously as he ranted on. How the hell did Lister know about that? During the whole rant Lister had only smiled and nodded. 

“Well then _talk_ to me!”

Rimmer looked at him coldly, hand still on his forehead. “Absolutely not.” 

“Listen, I’m sorry man.” Lister said reluctantly. “How many times do you want me to say it? I – am – sorry!”

“ _No_ \- you - are - not.” 

“It was an accident!”

“An accident? You poured a whole vial of it all over m-!” 

“ _Rimmer! I’m sorry._ ” Lister pleaded, not really wanting to have this conversation. 

“Sorry? Sorry doesn’t cover it! If it wasn’t for all the guards stepping in I could have been gang raped!” Rimmer closed his book with a bitter slam. “I was in medical isolation for over a week until the virus was out of my system. Do you know how utterly embarrassing that is? Do you know how serious that was?” 

Lister rolled his eyes, “You got us in prison! We would have gotten out of here if it wasn’t for you and your stupid sexual magnetism virus obsession. We could have saved those for something important, but then you just had to go and blow it.” Lister put his hands through the holes of the table and held onto it tightly. “It’s not my fault you just, handed it to me, anyways.” 

“Well I couldn’t be found with it!”

“Yeah, we all know how you and getting sick goes. The last time we dealt with that you ended up chasing us around the ship in a dress and hand puppet.” 

Rimmer’s head starting to compact into his neck like a pouty child as his glare only grew stronger. “Listey I haven't absolutely the faintest of ideas of what you are talking about. I tried to do the right thing.” He said to the side. He didn’t, really, but that wouldn’t change anything to his pride. 

“You turned us all in the save your own neck you human cockroach.” Lister slumped into his chair. “You pointed your fingers at the rest of us trying to get yourself out of trouble but your excessive whining and blame shifting just ended up getting us here without a proper trial. We’re all stuck here now, I hope you're happy, man.” 

 

Their trials had been a complete disaster for all of them. After being caught trying to escape Lister and Kochanski had gotten arrested again and their respective trials fast tracked ahead. Both had been interviewed separately, both of their accounts not being believed at the time. Ship records showed that this Starbug had left the ship without any clearance, and it had been very clearly them who had crashed it. 

During the trial process Cat had been proven to be sapient enough by the ship’s psychologist to be an accomplice, and even though he wasn’t faced with the full charge that the other two had, he still got a pretty hefty sentence. Despite his being reduced, Cat was still an illegal stowaway, and the verdict on what he would be doing after his sentence would be made when he would be ‘free.’ Odds were that he would be put back into the bridge until the ship would doc again, considering that he didn’t have a rank or a place on the ship. Kicked off his own ancestral land for not being useful enough for those now on it – if he was human that might have been considered a crime. 

And even though Rimmer had no involvement with the Starbug incident, he was still found guilty of only processing confidential crew files and conspiracy to assist the other three. For this, as well as interference with evidence he had been likewise sentenced to the two years that Lister and Kochanski were given. Rimmer had naturally tried to push the blame on the other two, making it out that they had forced him to do it, and that really didn’t help their cases. The group also hadn’t seen Kryten during the whole ordeal, and had to sit in prison with the knowledge that he was either out there in the ship with his mind gone or turned off and locked away in storage. Both options didn’t sit well for Lister. 

At the very least, Lister had been allowed to get a new arm. It was malt black with padding on the inside of the palm that responded to touch. The cost of the device had been taken out of his paycheck, so in terms of his old plan to save up and move back to Earth, he was back to square one. 

 

Rimmer rolled his eyes and opened his book back up to a page on airbags. 

“At least you’re talking to me, that’s a step in the right direction,” Lister said backhandedly as he left the cell to go and get some lunch. 

 

* * *

 

“How’s prison treatin’ ya?” Lister said to a tired looking Kochanski as he moved into the seat aside from her. She had been sitting at a table fiddling with her food with a plastic spork. The cafeteria wasn’t segmented by inmate sex, which would require making two cafeterias. Like many modern prisons, it was instead segmented by threat to other inmates and all given chips in their neck that would regulate inmate emotions. 

Can’t risk getting angry or too horny over inmates if you’re going to be shocked from the inside for doing so. This method would train the inmates to become calmer and better people once they left, but it often had the reverse effect due to repressed frustrations. Kochanski didn’t look all that happy to see him, but she still listened to him as he talked. 

“I’ve got a roommate, too,” She replied after listing to Lister for a while, “She just sits there and reads, threatenly.” 

“How does somebody read threatenly?” Lister asked with a slight laugh in his voice. 

“I don’t know - that’s what’s threatening about it. It’s not like I’m not used to sharing a room, It’s like, with Simulants or GELFS you know where they stand, with her I don’t.” 

“Oh, that’s nothing. I’m stuck with Rimmer, again. They put us in the same cell.” Lister said. 

“Well, you did say that you missed him.” Kochanski said looking at him with a coy eyebrow raised. 

“Remind me to never want for anything ever again.” 

Kochanski smirked. 

“The thing is, he’s the same total smeghead that he was before the accident, perhaps even worse. All that we’ve been through, just, gone. That would be like if _your_ David suddenly got reset to the me I was before I got put into stasis.”

“That sounds like an awful thing to experience, how do you cope?” Kochanski said putting on a fake caring voice. She knew exactly what that was like, she was eating lunch with that version of Lister right now. 

“Oh Smeg off. I’m not that bad,” He replied taking a messy swig of his drink. He had walked right into that with his landing lights blaring, hadn’t he? “Plus, he’s still mad at me, he’s only just started talking to me again today and it was an argument.” 

“An argument is a start at least.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

There were conversations going on all around them. Somebody dodged some food being thrown their way, another picked their teeth with their nails. Gruff people all headed towards some prison colony on the outer side of the solar system. 

 

“David, something has been really bothering me, and I can’t figure it out.” Kochanski began after taking a mouthful of her food. 

“Like what?”

“Remember back when we first arrived back here, and we got taken up to the captain’s office, he called cat a ‘Felis Sapien?”

“Well he is, isn’t he? What’s the problem there?”

“yes but, how did he know what that was? They didn’t exist in the 23rd century, at least as far as I’m aware.” She said, looking down into her own can of drink. It was weakly carbonated water, the closest thing that anybody on floor 13 had to alcohol. it wasn’t even nice carbonated water - it felt too aggressive.

“Maybe Krytes told them? Or Cat was asked.”

“Does Cat strike you as the type of person to identify himself as that? Ever? David, Cats don’t even use names because the concept of somebody not knowing who they are is beyond their comprehension.”

“Nah, I guess not.” Lister picked at his tray of food. It looked like it could have been some sort of synthetic meat, but he had absolutely no idea what it was supposed to be. It seemed to have the consistency of old handmade slime that was left out in the sun and crumbled like wet kinetic sand. He just hoped that it was safe to eat. At least it was miles better than dog food, or a pot noodle. 

“Something is very wrong here, I can just feel it.” Kochanski said with her fist on her cheek. 

“I think that it’s ‘cause of how quickly this has all happened. Ya’know, finding the ship, finding out the crew were all here, being sent to jail, finding Rimmer again, being in jail with Rimmer; it’s starting to bug me too.” 

“I think Arnold just has that effect on people. Once - and this was before you signed up - he came into the officer’s common room to refill the food dispenser in it and ended up in the ER concussed from the machine pressure shooting 4 chunky nut bars and 2 cans of Raspberry Fizz at his head after the two somehow got into an argument.” 

Lister chuckled into his sleeve as the Cat came to the table, quietly sitting next to Lister with a tray of food in his hands. He looked like he did after Rimmer took over his body, only worse. Cat’s hair was untied, large bags under his eyes big enough to go backpacking around Phobos with. Lister gave him a weak hug like a pet owner trying to calm their pet as they were given shots. He didn’t really know what else to do. Even after all these years Lister still felt a bit like a reasonable owner to him, but not in a weird way - more like a ‘cool older brother/pseudo-God who feeds him’ sort of way. Cat clearly wasn’t coping with his new environment. 

Unable to nap when and where he wanted, unable to eat more than three meals a day, unable to do anything with his appearance; and even worse was how he was forced into a baggy light purple uniform like everybody else with no way of a least making it presentable. On top of that, and the worse part of it all was, he had missed his date with that woman who had shown him to the officer’s area. The only thing that he had going for himself was that he was in a cell all alone. 

“How’ya doing man?” Lister asked sincerely. 

Cat looked at Lister with a feline mix of resentment and judgement before taking a large bite of his food in protest. He didn’t blink once during the whole time it took to eat his food before walking back quietly the way he had come from. Lister sighed and did the same. 

 

* * *

 

Later that day, Rimmer was walking back from his shower with a faded grey towel slung over his shoulder softly humming something to himself. He liked to try and have his showers when nobody else did to avoid as many people as possible. That plan never really worked, but it made him feel better about himself. 

Along the long, winding hallway back to his cell, Rimmer noticed that the Cat was there, doing, uh, something. He was unscrewing and reaching into the vents, sticking his arms and face into them. Rimmer stopped to watch for a while. 

“What on Io are you doing you festering fleabag?” He finally asked when Cat was halfway in one of the larger vents. Cat tucked his head out to see who was talking. 

“I’m investigating.” He said casually. Cat’s hair was in a thick messy braid going down his neck. 

“Oh, are you now?” Rimmer replied. 

“Yeah monkey man. I’m trying to smell where all the vents go. If I can figure that out I might be able to get outta here.” Cat answered as he crawled backwards out of the tunnel. 

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but I highly doubt there are any vents leading from the ship’s Prison that are big enough for a human to go though.”

Cat put his hands in his jumpsuit pocket. “I’m not human, am I?” Rimmer couldn’t argue with that. The Cat pulled out a nail file from one of the pockets and cleaned up a few of his claws. 

Rimmer rolled his eyes and started to walk away.

“You seem really stressed.” Cat said, still looking down at his hands. 

“What makes you think that?” Rimmer replied, voice going tense. 

“I’m a cat, I can sense these things. Usually I can smell it, too, but couldn’t smell it on you before. Still applies.”

“Why wouldn’t you be able to smell me? Is Lister so repugnant it blocks out everything else?” Rimmer asked, turning back around so the two of them were facing each other. 

“No stupid, it was because you were a hologram before. You smelt like a mix of a burning microwave and chipmunk cheeks guitar all the time. It was weird.” 

Rimmer didn’t really know how to respond to that. “So what, you just smell pheromones and stuff?”

“Yeah non-bud. If humans went into heat, I'd be able to smell that too.” Cat replied in a very matter-of-fact way. 

“That’s just disgusting.” 

“It’s even worse when it happens in front of you, believe me.” Cat said, putting the file back in his pocket. Rimmer started to make a comment, but figured that it was better not to, knowing what the cat was most likely referring too. 

Rimmer fluffed his curly hair with his towel and walked back to his cell. Cat slid through one of the vents, pulling the door of it closed as he tucked himself in. Rimmer had a smug feeling that he knew exactly where this was going to go; either Cat was going to end up in some maximum security part of the prison once he got busted or he was going to find out how futile the escape was going to be and have to admit that good ‘ol Arnie J was right. Either way, it was none of his concern.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so I lied a little about the script-reusing - but hey if the scene is already there, why not? Lotta talking in this chapter - sorry for that. You can probs tell that I’m not going to be using Kryten much in this, season 7 and 8 Kyten knows how little he deserves to be talked about in a good light. He’ll return, but not for a while. 
> 
> Those vents are going to come back into play later, so watch out for that.


	6. It's not Aliens, Rimmer.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang try and work out what the hell is happening to them - to varying success.

_“Aliens!”_

“No!” Two very tired voices called out in unison. They’d been in this very conversation for the past hour now, and there was no sign that it was going to end any time soon. 

The (now former) crew of Starbug were sitting in a semi-emptied out chair and table storage room. Kochanski was standing up with a black whiteboard pen in hand and Lister was sitting at a desk. Rimmer was also standing on a chair in the middle of the room, arms spread out like a rouge impressionist trying to catch a word that they had forgotten in the middle of their set. His eyes were large and smile wide at the prospect that they could be dealing with, wait for it, aliens. 

Cat hadn’t even shown up, smart guy. 

An old whiteboard was fixed to the wall across from them, incomprehensible scribbling in marker pen left it anything but white anymore. A crude drawing of the Red Dwarf ship and the five (Lister, Cat, Kochanski, Kryten, and Rimmer) of them inside of it lay in the middle (done by Rimmer himself earlier in the meeting, he insisted on drawing the whole 1200+ strong crew and passenger count for accuracy sake; but he wasn’t allowed to) with lines coming off all over it. The words ‘Aliens’ was a strong figment, each and every iteration of the word crossed out or smudged off in some way. The point of this little meeting was that the four of them (well three, until the Cat showed up) needed to figure out what had been happening to them and the Red Dwarf ship itself. The whole situation was really getting to them, Kochanski most of all. 

The board also featured dot points of; ‘BTL – can’t be, we smashed the cartridge,’ ‘Squid ink – gross’ And ‘Nanobots - why?’ The first two were the leading theories. 

"AL. IE. NS. You know," Rimmer continued undaunted, "Grotesque little men with small beady eyes and ears so wide they can pick up satellite reception," Slouching his posture slightly, Rimmer scrunched up his face to mimic his impression of one.

Lister leaned back in his chair a bit to peer up at Rimmer, "So you're saying they resemble you, then?"

“Arnold, if you can give me one single reason as to why aliens would send us on a trans-dimensional journey through time, space, and reality for the past four years and then just chuck us back here like nothing had ever happened, I’ll write it on the board. But until then, please just, shut up.” A stilted English accent came from the other side of the room. Kochanski was the one who called for a meeting and was honestly starting to regret it now that she knew how it was going.

The short of it was, nobody knew anything besides the fact that they didn’t know anything, and it was eating her up from the inside. Kochanski hated not knowing what was going on and not being in control of the situation. It just didn’t seem fair. 

“Let’s review some of our notes here,” she said twirling the pen in her hand, gathering herself back together. 

“It must be the work of stimulants.” Lister pitched for the second time. 

“They would have killed us before we landed. They hate all forms of Human life.” Kochanski said, not looking up. 

“GELFs?” Rimmer suggested, still standing on that chair. Lister had filled him in before as to what GELF’s were and he’d taken it surprisingly well. Genetic mutants that were created centuries after Red Dwarf fell out of commission that had spread across the universe over time. Evolving, changing, adapting. Rimmer had thought of it as being rather fascinating. Those were pretty much aliens, and that was mostly why he liked the idea of them so much. 

“Polymorphs that took over the roles of the crew to avoid detection and to keep us imprisoned like farm animals so they can harvest our emotions later?” Lister put forth while picking at his teeth with the cap of an old pen he had found on the ground. 

“Would have also killed us as soon as we got here. Doesn’t sound like what I know to wait in hiding like this. It seems like too much work for 4 people’s worth of emotions.” Kochanski responded, tapping her pen on the _‘?? ? Polymorphs?? ??’_ written quite prominently on the board. “My best guess is still that we’ve somehow travelled back in time and space, but I can’t pinpoint the event as to when it would have happened. It might be related to the dimensional portal that was created that I crossed over with, but I don’t have anything to prove it until we can actually look at Starbug’s Blackbox for ourselves.” 

“Okay that’s all well and good, but what if it’s something that you haven’t encountered yet? Something new and hard to explain since you don’t know what you’re even explaining?” Rimmer rocked back and forth on his heels and then leaned in towards nobody, “Like Aliens.” 

A whiteboard pen flew through the air like a bullet and landed smack dab in the middle of Rimmer’s forehead leaving a spot of ink where, for the rest of the crew, a large H usually sat. Rimmer blinked, smiled and sat back down on the chair in agreeance with his arms around the back. Lister’s head fell to the table that he was sitting at with a light thud, “Rimmer, are you sure that you know nothing? Haven’t seen anything weird? Anything at all that can help us in any way?” He said with half of his mouth kissing the table. 

Rimmer had been adamant from the very beginning that he had no idea about the radiation leak, or about being a hologram for the last half a decade that the others had gone through. And how would he even be able to? As far as the others knew, Rimmer had gotten out of bed as normal, did his rounds alone, and then found out about the Starbug heist when Lister first told him and got wrapped into the whole ordeal with the promise of them being able to get him finally promoted. It had been a weird day, but not his weirdest, yet. 

Rimmer shook his head and crossed his arms. “You’re all space crazy, that’s what it is. I still don’t know why you’ve wrapped me into this whole situation. That’s how we got arrested and sent to the Hull in the first place. I didn’t even have any part in destroying that Starbug.” 

“You still stole the viruses and the crew’s files, and stopped us from getting out of here you smegger! You don’t believe us, do you? After all we’ve been through together already.” Lister asked him for what seemed like the thousandth time. It had been utterly useless trying to get anything out of this man. 

“Listy, you came out of nowhere with an alien, a robot from the future, and a first officer in a stolen Starbug and then got me punished like,” he gestured his hands around the room, “- You two.” 

“Cat’s not an alien.” Lister said painfully, picking up his head and resting in on his left fist. He would have preferred to rest it on his right, but he had forgotten to charge his arm overnight. The arm was currently sitting back in his bunk room plugged into the wall. Even after all this time he still wasn’t used to having a prosthetic arm, looking after it was sometimes more annoying than outright not having one. Maybe this whole ordeal would be at least a little bit better if he just had his real one back. “Cat evolved from a normal cat, _my_ old cat. He’s as much from Earth as you or I, or any of the GELFs that we’ve had to deal with.” 

“I’m not from Earth, am I? If anything, you’re both aliens to me.” Rimmer responded looked at Kochanski and Lister, both of whom, as far as he knew were born and raised on Earth - an entire other planet to his own of Jupiter. Kochanski rolled her eyes though a polite facepalm. She was starting to fully understand why this universe’s Lister was like he was. Being forced to be stuck with Rimmer for all eternity would drive anybody absolutely mad. “Why would it be so far fetched? You need to open up your minds and think about the possibilities,” Rimmer continued. 

Kochanski walked over and put her head on the same table that Lister was sitting at, tucking a chair in to sit on as she did. “At any point I’m going to wake up in the Starbug’s medical bay with the real David, Cat, and Kryten all looking after me and I’m going to hear them try to explain that I’ve been doused in Despair Squid ink after a scouting mission and this whole thing has just been a big hallucination. Losing them, getting stuck in another reality, finding out that I’ve been sleeping with my own son this whole time, and being put into Prison. I can just feel it.” 

Lister put his arm on her back trying to sooth her, it didn’t do much to help. “If it was a squid attack or a total immersion game, then there would be a way out of it. The trick would be to find a way to do that.” Lister said, trying to keep her hopes up. 

Rimmer just rolled his eyes. “Yes that’s usually how those things work.” 

“Oh, what do you know? You’ve faced fuck-all.” Kochanski said, turning her head towards Rimmer. 

Rimmer glared back. 

“Who died and left you in charge, anyways?” Rimmer asked snidely, growing tired of the day’s antics. 

Kochanski looked up from the table and right into Rimmer’s eyes. “Everybody, Arnold. Every single person on board the ship died in a rather large and powerful radiation leak and then left me in charge three million years later.” She replied with a forced smile. 

“That wasn’t me!” Rimmer called out in defence. His arms where out, expression tense on his face. 

“Well you still did it. No matter what version of you ‘you’ are.” Kochanski said coldly. She didn’t need this. 

Rimmer grit his teeth.

“I honestly don’t even understand you, Arnold. Do you wake up every day with the sole purpose of making everybody’s life miserable?” Kochanski said with a tired snarl. 

“Why of course not!" Rimmer replied indignantly. Before resuming an uppity expression. "Push-ups and jogging usually comes first.”

Kochanski rolled her eyes. “Usually you’re such a suck up towards me, what’s wrong?” she asked as if she was talking to a child that she didn’t like the parents of. 

“What's wrong, you ask? Would you like to know?" Rimmer exclaimed, voice squeaking at the end. 

“No, not re-“

"Well, I’ll tell you. I’m not usually in prison, for starters." He griped in a nasally condescending tone, not caring what Kochanski had to say. “Having to wear clothing that would make even Lister puke and subsist on food that's so putrid it would make a rat in a junkyard keel over. Being falsely accused for a crime that I didn’t even do and have any future career prospects taken away from me. That’s what’s wrong. Do you have any actual idea what it's been like for me?" 

Kochanski let out a long suffering sigh and glanced down at her own purple jumpsuit, then back up at Rimmer. "I'm pretty sure I have an idea," She replied though her teeth. 

"Good. You understand then." Rimmer sniffed, dramatically re-folding his arms over his chest like a petulant child. "Frankly, unless you’re a warden I don’t think it matters what you or anybody else here has to think.”

The two of them exchanged strong glares. Both of them were people of high pride and wouldn’t back down for the other. Their horns were locked together but neither were going to be the one to push first. 

“I miss Kryten.” Lister said quietly to himself. The tension in the room was thick enough to cut with a butterknife. Kochanski and Rimmer looked back at him, before Kochanski sighed and put her head back onto the table. Rimmer kept is arms crossed, elbows resting on the back of the chair with his legs on either side of it. 

“Even if he couldn’t help us he would at least be able to say something that sounded smart. He’s got a knack guessing the right answer like that.” Lister continued as he looked down at his hand. 

The other two exchanged looks again. It was hard to get a good reading on either of their faces as they avoided looking into the other’s eyes. At that exact moment, a tall man in a large white tiger striped coat came spinning in the room with an excited yowl. 

“I see that you’ve found ya’ coat there, Cat.” Lister said from across the room as the cat strolled in looking quite pleased with himself. 

“Takes more than that to keep Mister Kay-Ay-Tee away!” he replied gleefully popping his collar out. 

“Where’d ya get that?” Lister asked. 

“I have certain charms and skills you monkeys don’t know about; still no luck on gettin’ an escape route for us - Ya gonna’ have to keep thinking of something else.” Cat replied, avoiding making a direct answer to the question. 

The arrival of Cat sort of killed the meeting as he changed the topic of the room to himself. That was a natural event for the man. Rimmer and Kochanski shared a mutual resentful look, before Kochanski rubbed off the pen on the whiteboard with her sleeve as Rimmer put his chair back onto one of the chair piles in the corner of the room. They didn’t exchange any words when they both left.

 

* * *

 

A day or so later, when the events of the meeting wasn’t fresh in any of their minds, Rimmer was walking through the halls trying to stretch his legs and mind. He past quite a lot of the Tank cells, as would be expected for a prison hallway. 

Most rooms had their doors closed, a few had people chilling on the bunks. A couple of them were just downright empty, and one of these caught his attention. Rimmer walked backwards a few paces to get a better look. He ducked his head in the doorway and saw what looked like the Cat doing something on a counter bench. Rimmer took a step into the room, and raised his arm to comment.

Kochanski was there, resting on the wall next to the door. “Hey Rimmer.” She said quite casually. 

Rimmer flinched, not expecting her to be there. He turned to face her, “Uh- hello.” he stammered, not having much else to say. “Is this, _your_ doing?” Rimmer asked as he pointed his hand towards the Cat. Cat was waxing his legs with his prison jumpsuit rolled all the way up to the top of his thighs. He seemed highly focused on what he was doing, but his ears did turn back when Rimmer and Kochanski started to talk. 

“Honestly I’m just here to see how this goes. I’m probably the only inmate here that knows any first aid training.” Kochanski said, looking at Cat. 

Rimmer put his arm down and did a double take, “Pardon?” he asked. 

“It’s like, watching a car caught in a tight parallel park try and get out but repeatedly hitting the cars before and after it. It’s a complete disaster that can’t get any worse, but it just keeps going. You really have no other choice but to stand there and watch.”

“Are you… okay?” Rimmer asked, growing concerned for the woman beside him. Kochanski didn’t seem mad; more, distant. 

“Space changes you, Arnold.” Kochanski replied blankly, a painful feline yelp came from the other side of the room. “Was there something that you wanted?”

Rimmer rubbed the side of his arm. “I wanted to,” He paused, not fully knowing what to apologise for, “-For before.” Rimmer didn’t really want to apologise, it felt like he was surrendering whatever fight there was between them. But, if he was going to be part of this suicide mission of a team then it would be in his best interest to at the very least be on good terms with somebody like Kochanski. 

Kochanski was taken back a little. This wasn’t something that she was expecting to happen, much less from Rimmer. She sighed and looked back at him. “It’s alright.” 

“How did you two manage to get hot wax in a prison?” Rimmer finally asked after a pause. Cat rolled down one of his pant legs and moved on to work on the second. 

“I’m pretty sure that Cat had stolen it from somebody, I’m just here mostly to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.” Kochanski said, looking up at Rimmer’s face. 

“You seem a bit, different.” Rimmer said, resting on the other side of the doorway. The space between them didn’t seem to affect the conversation. 

“Oh, I was wondering if anybody would have noticed.” 

Rimmer blinked. Was there something that he said wrong? Admittedly he didn’t know her that well – still didn’t. Either way he was sure she was Scottish the last time they talked. Maybe it was because she was ‘apparently’ from another dimension – it still wouldn’t hurt to ask. 

Kochanski exhaled, “It’s a long story,” she began. She opened up her mouth to start telling it before she stopped herself. Her face went through a mixture of emotions as she tried to formulate a good response. It was the type of face you make when you start to tell a story to somebody but then realise what you did to get that story was highly illegal, when you start telling a joke and then realise that you had forgotten the punch line, but you have to make up a proper ending to it since everybody is listening. Her eyes shrank. “There was a biro.” She finally said distantly, war flashes over her eyes. 

Rimmer didn’t really know how to respond to that other than to just simply say a quiet, “What? Like the pen?”

Kochanski nodded. “Yes. I’m just thankful that Cat and I are both alive, there was a spare copy of David backed up, and we were able to rebuild Kryten.” 

Rimmer was still a bit baffled. It wasn’t really the answer that he was looking for. “You know that you are literally the only person in this version of reality that knows what the smeg you’re talking about, right?”

“It’s better that way. It’s all a bit silly, now that I’m actually trying to think about it.” She said a little sheepishly. 

“Alright then,” Rimmer said at attention with his arms at his side.

The two shared a long silence. 

“Have you ever been to Earth?” Kochanski asked, keeping their sad attempt of a conversation going for some unknown reason. Cat was still waxing his leg with the grace of something trying to move around as a human for the first time in its life. He let out another quick nip of a yowl. 

Rimmer paused for a moment, thinking. “I once stayed in a motel in Luna City 4 for three weeks while I was on planet leave. The ship that I was working on at the time had docked for the end of it’s trip and I had a bit of time before the next one; but never the Earth itself. I almost went to Europe, but just got a couple of souvenirs instead.” 

There were seven Luna cities on Earth’s moon. The first, just known as ‘One,’ was the first off-planet colony ever made. It was once a place of science and long, windy corridors but now lived as just a tourist destination. It was never meant to have a long shelf life or be comfortable, but it was incredibly important to the history of humanity. The other six colonies were cities that formed a circle around the first in a variety of sizes. Each of them had a population of a large-ish town comprised almost exclusivity of dock workers, tourists, or people whose family once lived there once and had never been able to leave. Luna city 3 was the most ‘touristy’ one of the lots, designed to entertain poorer people from Earth that didn’t have ways to go to any planet better, and also history buffs since it covered right over the Apollo 11 site. It was ungodly tacky, and you could see it’s bright and flashy lights from the planet below on a clear night. 

Rimmer had grown up on a Luna colony, but on Io instead. It was the same Io that was under the stress of Jupiter’s pull, the same Io that had volcanoes all over it and the prospect of cities once thought laughable. Laughable or not, people persisted. Rimmer’s family had been around Jupiter for generations, and he grew up in his grandfather’s old estate inside of it’s very own climate-controlled bubble. The Rimmer’s were one of the earliest and highest-flying families in the outer rim, he had always had a lot to live up to. 

‘Rimmer.’ He got bullied for that name relentlessly in school once his classmates caught on to an old 21st century slang that the word shared. Still, he wore the label with as much pride as he was able to produce.

“You were born on a moon, right? Was it Io?” Kochanski asked. 

“Yes,” Rimmer replied, proud of that fact. 

“That’s probably why you’re so tall,” Kochanski replied absentmindedly. 

“Well, that could be a reason.” He really didn’t feel like going into the hell that was his father’s morning stretching routine. That wasn’t really much of a good conversation topic with anybody aside from a therapist. 

Before either could say anything else, a stray, yet very smooth leg came between the two of them. “Check this out.” A soft purr came from its owner. Rimmer and Kochanski just laughed at the absurdity of the moment, it felt really good for both to finally have a reason to smile. They looked at each other after the fact, and softly laughed together once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm one of those people who think Rimmer and Kochanski could of at least had a mutual relationship base on some common interests and backgrounds, if neither of them were so stuck up about themselves. Ah well, cannon can't be perfect.
> 
> I should also say that the first half of this chapter was the part of this whole fic written - Hopefully, it doesn't show.


	7. Leaving the Nest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang go on their first Canary mission, and an old memory gets dug out of the dirt.

Long ago, back when Earth was the only planet with a human population, miners used to use canaries as an early warning system as the birds had a rapid breathing rate, small size and high metabolism compared to the human miners meant that if there was a presence of carbon monoxide it would die first. Of course, these poor birds got phased out over time, but those small birds still have a legacy all these centuries later. 

For Lister, Kochanski, Rimmer, and the Cat, this was a position that none of them would ever want or have expected to be in - but sometimes the universe is just there to try and fuck with you. Or maybe a shipmate of yours signed you up to it without you knowing for missions into certain death; that can happen too. it’s more common than you think and a great way to advance and move the plot. 

The trip in the cramped blue midget down to an old wreckage, that the ship’s scanners had seen when they passed, was a very quiet one for the four of them. At one point Lister smiled an apology, but that was only met with a very Kochanski-esk glare from the others. The computer’s from the derelict ship they were heading towards might be working enough to extract information, so that’s why the few dozen Canary soldiers had been sent down with a small picking of less than thrilled skutters and ‘just in case’ guns that most likely didn’t even work. 

 

Once all of the other canaries had left the Blue Midget and dispatched, the four of them were sectioned off and given a pile of stuff to take down to the drive room of the old ship. The job for the ‘hatchlings,’ as one of the other prisoners had mockingly called them the first time they were briefed, was to see what was around. The other canaries took guns and electronic devices from boxes without talking, all travelling in a messy line deep into the wreckage. 

“This is a very hard job to blow,” One of the wardens in charge of the operations said with a snarl as he handed Rimmer a clipboard with a crudely printed map of the ship and pen markings circling the points they had to check out. Rimmer took the information with a cowardist smile before he ordered the others to go to their first point of interest. 

The quartet eventually found themselves alone down a hallway in a messy line of their own. Lister was walking next to Rimmer at the time, “I wonder what the other’s are going to be doing?” He asked, looking over at the map in the other man’s hands. 

“It’s a derelict ship,” Rimmer replied studying the very clipboard, tapping his thumb on the edge of it, “I’d say go and look for survivors and/or find out how it crashed.” 

“I doubt there would be any survivors, usually in these things they are either long dead or in stasis or somethin’. Sometimes not even human.”

“So they’ll be looking for bodies.” Rimmer replied only half listening. 

Lister shrugged and slowed down his pace, letting Cat pass him so he would be right next to Kochanski. He took half of the boxes of empty hard drives that she was carrying and slung them over his shoulder. It was a lot heavier than he was expecting. “This better than being cooped up?” He asked trying to make small talk as he adjusted his grip. 

“It’s not the worse thing I could be doing with my time, let me leave it at that.” She said looking back at him. Kochanski had on a hat with her hair tied up and tucked into it. The last time Lister had seen her in a hat was back when they both used to wear the old beige uniform. 

The group kept on walking. Down a flight of stairs, past rooms of what would have once been living spaces, and hallways. Eerier, quiet hallways illuminated with Rimmer’s torch, and not much else. The old ship was a ghost town of what it used to be, and the crew who flew in it once were. 

Their boot steps echoed a cold, dusty sound. Cat, who had been walking while carrying nothing suddenly stopped in his tracks in the middle of one of the larger main hallways. “Something’s wrong,” He said with a twitch. The rest of the group stopped with him, Rimmer turned around to see what was going on. 

“What is it, Cat?” Lister asked as he moved his boxes to his hip. 

Cat didn’t say anything. His nose and ears began to twitch as if he was listening out for something. 

The distant sound of a bazookoid fire echoed from floors above them. The group exchanged worried looks as it caused them to flinch. Before any of them could properly react, the wall came down around them, falling to the side in large pieces of hardened plaster and metal supports. 

Lister and Kochanski ducked backwards, dropping their cargo as they jumped when a large steel beam cut them off from the rest of the group. A second one came down above Rimmer and the Cat. Without thinking, Rimmer ran forward and yanked the Cat by his collar throwing him down the corridor before it came down. The second support hit Rimmer on the shoulder, forcing him to fall with it. He didn’t have ample time to brace himself after the hit before he had to weave and dodge out the way of another sheet of ceiling metal. Lister called out Rimmer’s name in panic before he and Kochanski dodged their own pile of debris tightly in each other’s arms. The sound of whatever was going on upstairs just got louder, when another bazookoid blast ran through the shipwreck shaking it to the core. 

“What the smeg is going on?” Lister yelled out reflexively in panic as the ceiling crushed before them. Rimmer moved out the way in a four-legged and equally-panicked crab walk towards the Cat and away from the rubble, dropping his clipboard as he did it. 

The walls gave way, plaster dust filling the air. 

Lister and Kochanski held each other tightly and jumped out of the way, bodies lying as small and flat as they could be as the last of the ceiling fell on top and around them. There wasn’t a scream, more of a uniform grunt as they both crashed into the floor. 

The pair’s breathing grew fast and shallow. It was dark and muggy, but they were alive. 

The dust began to slowly clear, the debris in their hair thick enough to cause them both to cough. The whole moment had happened so fast neither even really knew what exactly had happened. 

Kochanski’s radio cracked, but she didn’t answer it. 

After a few moments of the two of them trying to piece together what exactly had happened she got off Lister and sat down, picking up the frantic radio as she did it. “Hel-“

“Oh thank god you’re alive,” Rimmer’s voice was on the other line, his voice cracked when she answered. You could hear that he had been worried out of his life. 

“Yes, yes we’re alive, a little squashed, hang on.” Kochanski pulled out a torch from her pocket and pinned it in between two larger bits of rubble. The two of them were stuck in a bubble along a wall, but otherwise unharmed. “We’re up beside a vent,” Kochanski said into the receiver as her hand traced along a gutter on the wall. It didn’t seem to have a way to get in from the outside, there purely for the air conditioner. “No way to get in, but we’ve got air.” 

The device cracked again. “The Cat and I are in one piece, but the road’s blocked,” Rimmer’s filtered voice commented. Kochanski seemed to relax a tiny bit, at least everybody was okay – that’s the important thing. 

Lister didn’t comment. The walls around them seemed to creak mockingly. 

On the other end of the hallway Rimmer walked over to a vent by the bottom of the wall, it looked big enough to go through, but Kochanski had been right about there being no way in. “I know these sorts of vents,” Rimmer said into his radio after he checked it out. 

“You do?” Kochanski’s voice buzzed in. 

“Yes, I’ve worked on ships with something like these, you can open them from the inside.” It was fitted like that so you could take them out and clean them from the skutterway on the inside, but the design was made to be as sleek as possible as to not be an ‘eyesore.’ Didn’t really help when you needed to go into them from the outside, but usually when you design a vent system for a spaceship you don’t really think of why you would need to be able to do that. 

You sure do think about it when you’re a young 3rd technician on a ship and have to get a broken down skutter out, or when a crewmate just survived a ceiling collapse, that’s for sure. 

There was a pause from the other line. “Why? Who would you design it like that?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” Rimmer replied in a very matter-of-fact way. 

Lister watched Kochanski talk, he was quiet. The two on the radio devised a plan. It seemed simple enough, Rimmer and Cat would go through the vents, open up the grate and they would all move out. 

Simple enough. Luck seemed to be on their side today. 

Lister sat down crossing his arms like a child who’s been denied extra dessert, his vest getting brought up over his head like a hoodie as he slid down with a pout. He knew how stupid he was being getting freaked out here, but he couldn’t help himself. “How does this stuff keep happening to us.” He said to himself quietly, accent only getting stronger as he got more and more stressed. “This is so much smeggin worse than bein’ stuck in those smeggin’ vents and we’re going to have to go through these ones as well.” 

Kochanski sat down across from him before taking her hat off and undoing her ponytail, putting the hair tie around her wrist. “The others are going to get us out, don’t worry.” 

“Oh, great we’re going to die here.” Lister said through clenched teeth. 

“Not necessarily.” Kochanski replied, stressing the ‘not.’ 

Lister gave her a look. He really wasn’t all there, where he was crouching down in a pile of stress so solid you could snap it in half with the click of fingers. He almost looked like he was about to cry. “You and I are going to die here, and it’s all me fault.”

“You didn’t cause the ceiling to collapse, I would rather be in a cave like this than crushed by the rubble, anyways. You pushing me out of the way saved my life.”

“I put us into the pile! Not out of it! I signed us up for this stupid smegging Canary thing, not anybody else!” 

“It’s not as ba-“

“Is it? How bad do you think this is?” Lister said through a voice crack. 

“Well we’re not dead, for a start.”

“Oh, for how long?”

Kochanski put her hand on Lister’s knee, “David, if you would just listen-“

“Can you just – leave me alone? You’re not me Mother!” Lister said in retaliation pushing her away. It took him a second to realise what he had said. Both paused and went quiet. He crossed his arms again and looked at the ground. “Sorry.” He muttered sheepishly. 

Kochanski looked to the side, not really knowing how to respond to that. She was, in fact, his mother. Well, at least biologically. It was a weird subject that the two of them had tried their best to avoid since that little factoid came into play in their lives. 

“How does the same smeg keep happening to the same guy?” Lister began to vent. The stress of the situation was really starting to cut into him, “Twice with food tryin’ to attack me, every other person or thing we encounter keeps trying to kill us for no good reason other than us just existing, I lost the our ship – our home,” he was growing more and more tense by the word, “Everything always goes wrong and there is nothing I can do to stop it!” Lister put his hands around his head and began to pull on the short parts of his hair, “-And to top off all that! Twice I’ve had to give up me own children!” You could see the pain in him cut into his dark eyes as he said that last part. His heart sank deep into his gut. 

There was a pause. 

“I, didn’t know you were a father before,” Kochanski said, quieter than normal. She felt like she shouldn’t have said that. 

Lister seemed to sink lower into himself. His face scrunched up before he resentfully began to explain himself. “It was a couple of years ago. All said and done now I guess.” Smeg, he didn’t want to tell her about all of that, she didn’t need to know - and now he pretty much had just forced himself to tell the whole story, perfect. He could stop at any time, he knew that. 

“It was nothing much,” Lister lied into his collar. He could already tell that Kochanski was trying to distract him from their situation; intentional or not. 

“Oh, okay then,” Kochanski replied, sitting back down. She stopped herself from resting on the wall of rubble behind her, being careful not to disrupt it in the same was she was trying not to disrupt Lister any further. 

There was another pause. “Did you ever go into a reality where men and women were swapped around? With A Holly Hop Drive?” Lister said after a while. He seemed calmer than before. 

Kochanski nodded. “Yeah, I remember that. I think my double was named ‘Christopher’ or something.” Lister didn’t even need to say much more, as Kochanski only took a few seconds to connect the dots on what he was implying. Her face changed as it happened. “Oh. Oh. OoOh.” She said as it happened, tone of the ‘Oh’s changing as it happened in real time. Lister shrugged a sheepish shrug when she looked back at him. 

“So you, slept with the other you?” She asked, not entirely wanting to imagine the answer. 

“Yep. It’s not like I remember much of it, thank you very much.” Lister replied defensively. “And, it’s not like I would have chosen to do it had I been a little more in control of meself.” 

“And you got her pregnant?” Kochanki asked. 

Lister chuckled, much to Kochanski’s confusion, “It’s much worse than that. She got me pregnant.” 

Kochanski raised an eyebrow. Yeah, nah, a hard pass on that.

No, no, look - I’ll prove it to ya.” Lister said as he started to undo the overalls of his uniform. It was a tricky thing to do given the space and design of the uniform, but after a bit of fiddling he was able to expose his abdomen. He lifted up his gut in the little light they both shared so the two of them could get a better look. There, in-between his belly button and underpants elastic, poking out of thick dark body hair, was a prominent, yet distantly skutter-given caesarean scar. Kochanski didn’t say anything other than look at it in surprise. It was large and messy going lengthways, and looked like it hadn’t been taken care of after it was inflicted. It stuck out as soon as you noticed it. Lister would have seen it every time he looked down at himself while topless. 

“When we went into their universe,” Lister explained as he held his yellow shirt up, “Our bodies all changed over to the same laws as theirs for some reason. In that universe; it just so happens that men are the ones to get pregnant. When we moved back over to ours everything besides the ‘uterus’ bit changed back around to normal.” He put his other hand up in quotations when he said ‘uterus,’ but realised that they probably weren’t needed halfway through the word. 

“So there was, a baby in there?” Kochanski said as she looked down at the scar, almost wanting to touch it for herself to prove what he was saying was real. 

“Two of them.” Lister replied with a chuckle, letting go of his shirt. 

“Twins?” She responded in surprise. One baby seemed bad enough. 

“Yep.” Lister began to put his uniform back on, half tucking in what needed to be tucked. “Two little boys, Jim and Bexley.” A sadness seemed to cut back though his words in the form of a second Adam’s apple as he said their names. 

“Smeg,” Kochanski replied, expression lowering as she began to process what she was being told.

 

* * *

 

Cat and Rimmer couldn’t go back the way they had come to get help because of all the rubble that blocked off the hallway. Instead, the two of them kept on walking down the hall. Because the other two were up beside a vent, the best idea that could be thrown around between Kochanski and Rimmer was for Rimmer and Cat to get them from the inside though the vents and guide them out using the map in Rimmer’s hand to find their path. 

The Cat was clearly still in pain from his crash into the floor, rubbing his arm as he walked behind Rimmer. Cat’s hair was messed up and uniform even worse. Rimmer didn’t look any better, but didn’t appear to have any physical damage to anything other than his clothing and his own tussled up hair. The pair kept on walking, Rimmer stopping every once and a while to make sure the Cat was doing alright and still following behind. 

The Cat redid his low ponytail and moved up to the side of Rimmer, double checking the map. Rimmer let him see it clearer, but neither seemed to exchange any words. Their footsteps echoed throughout the long halls and the sound of the workings of the ship seemed to bleed in from floors above them. There was faint creaking that filled the ship with no canary voices to cover all of them. It didn’t feel quite right to leave the side of Lister and Kochanski, but what else could they do? With no other good option at their disposal, the two set off. This would have been fastest way out of it, hopefully. 

“You alright?” Rimmer asked as they walked. 

Cat just glared back, still rubbing his shoulder. He just mumbled something bitterly under his breath as he kept walking. 

“At least it’s not your face, hair can be fixed,” Rimmer said, correctly guessing what Cat would have been complaining about. Cat didn’t respond to that other than to mime what Rimmer had said back to him behind his back. Rimmer stopped in his tracks and looked over his map again. He turned a perfect 90 degrees and pointed his arm to the hallway on the left. “That’s our way in,” He said. Cat walked up next to him to see what he was pointing at. 

“The hallway?” 

“No, you absolute imbecile,” Rimmer tapped the clipboard with his thumb for what felt like the 7th time that day. His map thankfully showed just enough to make out where the vents went, and didn’t get too damaged in the skuffle, “There is an entrance this way. Follow me,” He continued as the two of them made their way to a door big enough for a skutter, and just enough for a human, or cat, to crawl through.

 

* * *

 

Lister could still remember it all so clearly. The fear he felt as he had to wait a couple of weeks until he could be tested, and the even worse feeling of knowing that he was going to be a father right then and there when it came back positive. He wouldn’t have minded as much if he wasn’t the one who had to carry the two of them. Rimmer was ecstatic about the whole idea at the beginning, just based solely on the fact that Lister would be suffering greatly during it. 

When Lister had gone back to his own reality, his body hadn’t been able to shift everything back to normal. This left him with a sort of, pho-uterus inside of him, with no way for the babies to get out without forcing Lister to have a caesarean. During the pregnancy itself the two were safe inside of him, and outside of needing to take a bit of estrogen to help it all along it was a pretty successful pregnancy. Lister still had to be induced when the time came, nobody on the ship really wanted to know what his body might have done if he didn’t, or be caught by surprise at 3 in the morning one day by the impending arrival of the two mini Listers. 

During the 8-and-a-bit-months of the pregnancy, quite a lot had changed on board. Lister and Rimmer had changed rooms (and beds after around the 6th month mark so it was easier and safer for Lister to get in and out of bed), and they had even found Kryten again scattered in pieces on an asteroid. It had taken Lister and some skutters almost a month and a half to repair him, but it was worth it – Lister had a good reason to want to hurry the job. Of course he wasn’t able to get back the old personality or voice, but it made the last month of the pregnancy and the birth so much unbelievably better. Holly had also played around with their appearance and vibe. It was a lot of change for everybody. 

Cat had been able to find old baby stuff that he would have worn as a kitten for the twins to be dressed in. Almost all of the Cat-made baby stuff had been taken by the two factions on their respective arcs, but there was still some old bits and bobs lying around. Cat had even started to make some baby clothing out of boredom and necessity, a gesture that still warmed Lister’s heart to this day. 

Because the difference in reality of their parents and where the twins were born, the two of them began to age rapidly as soon as they were born. Lister’s body had acted like some sort of shield for the twins, but once they were out of him it was all fair game. The birth itself hadn’t been at all pleasant when the day came, Lister didn’t remember most of it due to a mix of being drugged up on painkillers and sheer exhaustion following the next few days. It was an uneasy calm before the storm that was difficult to shake. 

The next three days had been a chaotic blur. Lister was exhausted the entire time, and it was quickly proven that absolutely nobody on the ship knew how the deal with children of any age or size. Jim and Bexley didn’t seem to mind at all, they were just happy to hang out on the ship and spend as much time as possible with their dad and ‘Uncle Arnie.’ Cat was also fun for the two boys to mess with, and Kryten was more than worried about their development and Lister’s recovery. 

After they had all arrived back in the other universe (and had fast and awkward meet-and-greet, as expected when you get told you’ll be meeting 3-day-old babies and instead coming face-to-face with two adults) the twins had been rushed to the science room to see if the theory was correct. The machines showed that both of them were now aging normally, and the weight of the ship left Lister’s shoulders. 

After that was a 18th year / 3rd day birthday party down at the bar with all 9 of them. The twins had their first drinks during it, Bexley had taken to the drink far too quickly and ended up coughing half his lungs out after accidentally inhaling half a can of it. 

Nobody wanted to say it, but they all knew what had to happen. Jim and Bexley had to stay in their mother’s universe, there was no way around it. It didn’t seem fair for the two of them to live for only a fortnight just so Lister could have the gratification of seeing them grow up; that just wouldn’t be right. Lister didn’t cry when he hugged the two of them goodbye, he was so exhausted there was nothing left in him to do so. Besides, he didn’t want the moment to go to waste and leave a bitter feeling inside of them. As soon as their Starbug took off, Lister let himself collapse into a pool of raw emotion, letting himself cry out to nobody as it chugged back home. 

After all of it was said and done, Lister had fallen back into a deep depression. It was worse than the one he had fallen into when he first emerged from stasis, this time in was more quiet, more trying, even lonelier. He slept for about a week solid at first, but once he got his strength back he had just ended up staying there. The only times he really did anything was when he got his cesarean bandages cleaned or he ran out of stuff to re-watch and went for an explore around the old abandoned cat cities or to stay in the observation dome for hours at a time staring off into nothing. 

Over time, everything Lister had been through for the last 10 months slowly faded away. No more baby stuff hanging around still waiting to be used, no more of Rimmer quoting from every pregnancy book that he could find, no more of Cat complaining about how annoying having two babies on board would be and how much alterations he had to do to Lister’s clothing; and no more Kyten worrying every second about the impending birth and the health of the soon-to-be children. After a while, even his postnatal depression was gone. The only thing Lister had that proved that it all really happened was the old Polaroid of him with his boys in his arms as they cried out in growing pains and the scar in which was proof that they had once been inside and had come out of him. Sometimes he’d run his fingers over it just to try and remember what it was like, but it always made him feel horrible afterwards. 

According to a mandatory medibot check-up about a year later, it appeared that he could still get pregnant. Of course he would have to take hormones to get his body ready and use both a donor egg and IBF to do it, but it was possible. Lister had no intent of even seeing if the medibot was correct about that, once in a lifetime was enough. 

Kochanski was right to want to use a machine for all of that stuff.

 

* * *

 

After a bit of time and arguing, the Cat and Rimmer found themselves moving through a larger vent on their hands and knees. They moved in a line before Rimmer stopped, came up to one of the vents, and unlatched parts of it. Cat came up closer to watch what he was doing. 

“Uh, non-bud, that isn’t the right one.” Cat said confused. 

“Yes I know.” Rimmer replied before he lifted it open. Over time it had stuck altogether, but he was able to unstick the last of the latches and lift the vent up and back setting it on the floor next to Cat. Rimmer then half-climbed out of the new opening, before coming back in. 

“I'd hate to be a bit of a buzzkill here, but I don't think that was necessary.” Cat replied in a flatter tone. As far as he knew Lister and officer BB was being crushed worse than a trouser press. 

“I am just testing the theory, relax, you overgrown housecat.” Rimmer replied as he loosely placed the cover back. 

 

The two them kept moving along the way they had come. “I don’t know how good of a rescue plan this is.” Cat eventually said during their journey after taking the time to process what he was actually doing. 

“Look, we’re not going to get anywhere going back to get help from a warden. Just keep moving.” Rimmer knew how useless the floor 13 staff were already, no way on Io that they would be any help. 

Cat raised a feline eyebrow. “You don’t even know if the other yellow-jacketed dudes are alive.”

Rimmer looked back at Cat under his arm, his glare grew stronger. “The other two are, and they’re just up this way.” He didn’t even consider that to be a possibility, and he had no intention of starting to consider that now. He had enough on his plate as it was. 

Cat bit his lip. Dirt was starting to build up under his nails - gross. “Ya’know, a while ago we had to go through vents like this when we lost power to the ship. Looking back on it I don’t think Doormouse Cheeks coped well with it at all.” 

Rimmer stopped and looked back at Cat again. “What happened with him? Lister’s dealt with much worse.”

“Not sure; I guess it’s just a human thing.” Cat said idly. Rimmer hadn’t been around for their adventure in the ducts, and the basic idea of claustrophobia was far beyond Cat’s comprehension.

 

* * *

 

“So, what happened to them?” Kochanski asked after a mellow silence. Lister had explained what he felt like he needed to tell, but he didn’t go into much detail. 

“They grew up too fast. Some trans-dimensional-timey-wimey smeg. By the time we could figure out what was happening to them and get me boys back to the female-oriented universe, the two of them were already physically and mentally eighteen.”

“Oh. How long did that take?” Kochanski said softly. 

“Three days.”

“Three days? They grew to eighteen in three days?” Kochanski asked, not fully believing in what she was being told. 

“It was a very long weekend, I’ll give them that.” Lister said with a sigh, letting out the knot in his back that had been building this whole time. “I had to leave them in the other universe, they aged normally over there. They have Deb, Arleen and the Dog. It might not have been us exactly but it was the best I could give them.” 

Kochanski’s torch made a beep, telling the two of them that it was running out of power. It brought the two of them back into the moment at hand. 

There was another quiet pause shared between the two of them. Kochanski only wished that she had known about this before. If she had she definitely wouldn’t have asked her to help in creating another child and make him have to give it up like the other two. At the time Lister hadn’t protested or show any sign that it might have been a sore spot for him, even though it would have been a horrible point in time for him. Lister had avoided the development pod in the medibay when the baby ‘Dave jrn.’ was developing, as well as spending quite a lot of time by himself after having to take the baby back in time. At the time Kochanski just assumed he was trying to distract himself from the whole situation of being your own father - but now she realized that there was much more to this than she would have ever assumed. 

“I wonder if our alternative selves are having this exact conversation.” Kochanski eventually said. The tension in their cave was thick and muggy. The smell in their cave was metalic, not too far removed from the smell before it storms. 

“What?” Lister asked, not quite understanding what she was saying. 

“I mean,” Kochanski changed the way she was sitting so she would now have her legs crossed, “If their universe is more-or-less the same as this one, maybe they’ve also lost and re-found the Dwarf like we did?” 

Lister seemed to relax a little bit more. “Can you imagine showing up to the captain’s office with two more of me? ‘Hello si-“ Lister quickly corrected himself, “-madam - It’s us; Kochanski, Lister, Lister and other Lister!’ That wouldn’t have been fun to explain,” He said with a laugh as he imagined that situation. “‘Here we have two more of mes, but this time they’re blokes.’ Good luck to her to have to explain all of that.”

“-Speaking of unexpected blokes,” a voice came into the vents. Kochanski and Lister quickly looked towards it after a flinch, not expecting something like that to happen. Rimmer’s hand was holding onto the vents from the inside, with his face poking out through the gaps. Lister didn’t ever think he would be happy to see Rimmer again like this, not since that, uh, dream, he had a few weeks ago. 

“Rimmeh!” Lister said, moving away from the vents to give him some room. Admittedly it wasn’t much, but enough to get a better view of what was going on. There was the sound of a latch being undone with force, and Rimmer was able to use all of his strength to get it undone with a grunt. 

Cat meowed a soft hello as Lister and Kochanki joined them in the skutterway and they headed back the way they came. Kochanski’s torch didn’t last long after that, but it didn’t matter.

 

* * *

 

The journey back to the Red Dwarf once they had all re-joined the other canaries was a slow one. Lister sat on the end of the bench, cornered up by the window. The shipwreck they went down to investigate had crashed on a moon of water, it’s thick atmosphere obscuring any sign of water once you were above it. It was a quiet moon, no life had ever called it their home; aside from perhaps the ghosts of whoever once found their way onto that ill-fated ship. 

Kochanski and Rimmer had their fair hack into the ones in charge once they were able to, but it didn’t seem to do much aside from getting the two of them in trouble instead for not doing the job they had been assigned. It was a lot of Space Core safety directive quoting (and correcting) and just general frustration from the two of them. Of course, the two of them didn’t get an answer as to what had happened to cause the collapse, not like that would be helpful to know, nor siree. 

Cat didn’t seem to care either way – he just sat on a bench tidying up his cuticles. 

Lister sighed and took his exhausted gaze off the window and back at the group of yellow-uniformed convicts that he shared the transport with. They didn’t seem to care at all about what had happened, sitting at attention or chatting among themselves like they had done on the journey down. 

Their lives had just moved on, and so should his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can try and take Jim and Bexley out of my cold, dead hands ya hear me? Wish they had also addressed how Krissie felt about the whole “Lister is her son” thing, that would fuck anybody up. That would fuck both of them up way more than we got to see.
> 
> Also, did I write a whole chapter just so I can talk about the twins? Yes.


	8. The Room that knows all Possiblities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Featuring: glimpses of Dave jrn. and Holo!Lister, the USA reboot crew being attacked by a Polymorph, talk of Ace, and a Lismer kiss. Create what you want to see, I guess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit more of an angesty one, I'll admit that.

Sometimes Canary missions can be the dullest thing possible, sometimes they’re not. In such an empty universe, it can often be more of the first. 

Today’s mission was the standard ordeal. Go down to an interesting derelict and see what’s left down there to either kill you; or to take cool, plot-creating gadgets. The satellite they were going down to explore appeared to be an old United America station. The outside was white and clean and the inside was even more so. The place was clean and bright with plush walls and lights everywhere. You could see where the Canaries had all been because of all the dirt and grime they brought along with them.

The Canaries had been split up into groups with Lister, Kochanski, the Cat, and Rimmer thankfully all grouped together in one of them. The group was fairly big, around a dozen or so of them in total. The ship itself was massive in size and had a lot to explore - It had the sort of vibe that cruise ships or large malls have, but much more compact and sleeker. The main attraction of the satellite was a large auditorium that even more thankfully, our heroes got to see after a long trek to where it sat. 

The room was large and white. There were white, drawing mannequin-like mechanoids standing limply around at various points. None had faces or any colour to them. In the centre of it all was a small lectern jutting out with some sort of scanner covering its top in the shape of a right palm print. The room was quiet aside from the hum of the satellite or the footsteps of the Canaries. There was no dust to be seen, or any proof that anybody had ever been there before them. The cream neon glow of the hall invited them warmly inside. 

People looked around, one woman towards the back reported something into her radio. 

Cat looked at the lectern, and then back at Kochanski and Lister. He had the smile of a cat that was just caught seconds away from knocking something off a table, and knowing full well that nothing in this universe was going to stop it. His lip curled up as he took another step. 

“Cat, stop,” Lister said affirmatively, taking a step forward to follow him. Their owner/pet relationship only grew stronger in that very moment. 

Cat ran up to the lectern and put his right palm on its scanner. Suddenly, the room rose to life through cold white light and a hologramatic display screen appeared in front of him. Numbers spun over it like slot machines before finally settling on something that could be mistaken for a phone number. 

Cat moved his left hand up to the screen and began to scroll though the numbers, and then back down again. The number’s made a soft ‘click’ as they spun around not unlike the sound of a prize wheel spinning. The sound seemed to memorise the cat, his eyes dilating large with the colours and sounds that it made. There was a lableless button under the numbers and after looking at and ignoring the two canaries that were acting like dishevelled owners, he pressed it.

The mannequins around the room lit up and two of the Canaries put their guns up in response. The room seemed to glow brighter as the whirr of computer processing echoed around them all. 

Lister called out again to try and stop whatever the cat was doing, but it did nothing. He knew firsthand what Cat could be like when given strange and mysterious buttons. 

A scene was built out of sharp light. First out of a sort of ‘wireframe,’ and then it was dressed to look like a dingy corridor of a ship. A small group of mannequins, around 4 or 5 of them, began to move. Not like robots, but like stringless puppets being dragged loosely on the ground. The people closer to the stage moved back as the mannequins began to take their positions. 

In their spots, the mannequins began to be dressed in the same fashion as their surroundings. Their costumes were made of light; holograms fitted to a body. They all took a form of some kind of crew in matching uniforms not too far removed to the jumpsuits that everybody else was in. Two white men – one with a crew cut in a red Space Core uniform with what looked like a red dot on his forehead, and a taller one in a baggy vest that badly needed a haircut and a shave, a black dude in a leather jacket and a white woman with long frizzled out hair and armed with a weapon. The man at the back had the (pre-United-America) American flag on the back of his jacket in colourful sequins. He was also carrying a gun, but it was just casually slung over his shoulder as if he was molding with it. 

Cat didn’t move his hand or body, instead preferring to look over at the rest of the group and the scene being built and just found himself ecstatic. He hadn’t had any real excitement in forever not since, well, anything much. The other mannequins left on the walls didn’t move an inch as all of this was happening. Their lifeless bodies awaited their chance to be of use. 

The lights dimmed and the mannequins suddenly began to move. They walked down the corridor in a group, the man with the crewcut walking anxiously behind the woman with the gun. They didn’t really move, but instead acted as if they were on a treadmill. The set moved with them to create this illusion, disappearing and reappearing when it was needed to be seen. None of them made any sound aside from the faint skits of their boots on the floor as they pretended to move. The two towards the back (the one with the vest and the one with the jacket looked ) as if they were having a conversation, but no sound was emitted from either of them. 

The mannequin-people-thing who was second the group held out some sort of scanner before quickly directing the rest of his ‘crew’ to get into a position before a door.  
The door began to budge, something was trying to get in.

And without much time for the people to prepare themselves, it did. 

A monster of some kind erupted from its constraints. Tentacles and fur alike forced its way through to attack the crew. The man with the flag jacket braced his gun and began to shoot, but that didn’t stop the monster from cutting through the metal like it was wet sand. It made a silent roar and swiped at one of the people with a huge cat-o-nine-like arm that came out of it’s back. The man in uniform ducked behind the one in the vest in fear before the monster instead went teeth-first into him, it would have killed him, if not for Cat taking his hand off the device and killing the scene then and there. A small jolt of kinetic energy ran though his body as the connection was lost, causing him to sake for half a second. “ _Cool._ ” He said with an eager smile, the parts of his hair that weren’t yet tied down standing up. 

“What the hell did you do?” Lister said. He sounded like a disheveled parent. His hands where on his head, his hair pointing through his flingers.  
“Hey man!” Cat said with a twinge in his voice, “Why the stress?”

“Cat!” Lister said with strain in his voice, taking a few steps forward, “Doin’ smeg like that is how people end up dead.” Remember the time Lister got turned into a chicken because of Cat’s carelessness with buttons like this? Lister remembers that. 

“Well nobody’s dead! What’s the big deal?” Cat replied, unfazed as to what Lister was talking about. 

While the other two were auguring, Kochanski moved up to the lectern. She didn’t really know why she did it, she just felt somewhat drawn to it. Once she put her hand on the device the room seemed to fizzle, as if it somehow knew that she was from another reality. After a few seconds of figuring itself out, the numbers reappeared in front of her like they had done for Cat. The numbers were different from the first time, and like the first time the room was used Kochanski just pressed the glowing ‘okay’ hovering about a foot or so above her head. 

Four of the white dolls moved into position into the centre of the room, the rest of them moved to attention along the walls. The holographic room twisted and reshaped itself into a blue midget cockpit around the dolls. The rest of the room stayed white as normal, the front of the dashboard and rest of the ship exceeding the controls didn’t get rendered, either. With walls left out like this to give a view of the ‘crew,’ it almost looked a bit like a 3-walled set that you would see on TV. 

The dolls began to get dressed in holographic clothing and skin like before. The one on the bottom left took the form of Cat manning the ship’s controls. Everybody looked at the living Cat to compare briefly before turning to watch the rest of the scene build quickly. Two dolls ‘outside’ of the set rendered in the forms of a golden Kryten and red-jacket Kochanski, with the last sitting next to the cat taking the form of Lister. 

Or at least, that’s what it looked like. It looked like a Lister who had shaven and was in some kind of black quilted uniform, but still Lister unmistakably. An unmistakable Lister aside from the highly visible hologramatic ‘H’ that was fused to his forehead. The real Kochanski seemed to freeze up a little bit. 

The show started, dressed up dolls started to move silently going about their day. The Kryten started ironing something and the Cat flicked a couple of switches at his disposal. The fake Kochanski walked into the cockpit, holding something in her arms. It was hard to make out what it was before she gave the bundle to the fake Lister.  
It was quickly apparent that, swaddled up tight in the fluffy blanket, was a little baby boy. 

Maybe a few months old, but still old enough to sit on Lister’s lap comfortably before Kochanski went over and slid back into the chair behind the two. The Lister adjusted his seat, holding onto the child as carefully as he could as the baby in turn held onto his fingers tightly, looking up at the much bigger person with wonder. The Cat had looked at the two of them briefly before going back to whatever he was doing before the Kochanski had walked in. 

The canaries exchanged quiet looks with one another. It was mostly confusion, aside from Lister who looked worried, knowing exactly what he was seeing and Cat who was admiring how stunning his simulated double looked. That young baby looked exactly like Jim and Bexley did when they were briefly the same age, maybe when they were an hour or so old. Kochanski’s face didn’t change – she was completely transfixed at the sight before her, eyes glazed and unblinking like a statue. 

The fake Lister showed the baby in his arms the buttons that he was pressing, making it clear and direct to the child what each of them did. The baby was watching Lister as he worked, looking as snug and comfortable as somebody in its position could ever be - and that was quite a lot. The scene played out as normal as if this small family of people were just going about their normal day. 

Just before the fake Lister was about to say something to the chipper bundle in his arms, it all suddenly cut off, dolls falling back to the floor with a thud. Kochanski had ripped her hand away from the podium, rapid breathing telling that she had broken her transfection by herself. The hall was quiet as she took a couple of steps back, trying to compose herself. 

 

“So, what is it?” Cat said as he looked over at the vast room. 

A small wash of dejavu went over Lister briefly. “Not sure.” He replied. He turned towards Kochanski, “Are you alright there?” He asked her. 

Kochanski took a step back and rubbed her temples as she tried to focus herself. “Yeah, uh, sorry,” she replied in a way that told him that she wasn’t.

It didn’t take everybody that long to figure out, through quite a lot of trial and error, that this room, whatever it was, was able to show alternative yous.

The one that Kochanski had activated was a version of reality where she had never gotten stuck here all that time ago. That version of her, the version that she should have been; she was back on her ship with her real crew. The baby that she had asked the alternative (to her) Lister to help create had been grown and was now living with them. At that exact moment in time in that version of reality the baby boy they had created, had just gotten up from a nap and had been given over to Lister for some good quality dad time. It wasn’t a fun thing for Kochanski to come face to face with it as she did, it made her feel all sorts of sickness and guilt for what could - should have been. 

Though the gravity of the situation was that only Kochanski, Lister, and Cat even understood the significance of what they had seen.

“So if that’s the leading theory here, what the hell was up with the first one?” One of the Canaries said. None of the people in that display looked like anybody that was there, much less the Cat himself. Cat nodded when he got gestured at, annoyed that he didn’t see any hot cat babes swooning over him covered in syrup; like there clearly should have been.  
“I assume it’s an alternate universe where he’s dealing with that, thing. He could have already died or been out of the frame.” Kochanski said as she moved back towards the group, hand in her wrist as she checked over it. There didn’t seem to be any burns, cuts, or marks on it. Her palm felt slightly tingly as if it had fallen asleep, but it didn’t last long.  
“Maybe I am the alien,” Cat said as he picked at his teeth in a very ‘I am totally an alien’ sort of way.

Kochanski looked back at him and blinked. “What?” 

“You heard me, monkey-gal. Infinite possibilities, why not? So-” 

“Yes, but-“

“-I could be the alien.”

Kochanski let her forehead fall into her hand. There was no way in hell that she was going over this conversation again. “You know what? Sure. You do you, Cat.”

Rimmer, uncaring about the concern of his shipmates strutted towards the machine as the two of them talked, eager to see what might come up for him. As Rimmer tried to find a code that was valid, Lister began to wonder if they were about to see Ace again, it would make sense. Maybe, by some freak chance, he might tap into the old Rimmer. That would be a freak of a possibility, but it still was one. 

Once the ‘ping’ of the console rang, two of the dolls got into place with the room turning into one of the larger officer quarters on Red Dwarf with a couch in the front. One of the dolls on the couch took the form of Lister (a normal, non-hologramatic version) and the other took the form of Rimmer in a blue uniform at the table behind him going over a book covered in sticky notes. This Rimmer had the ‘H’ on his forehead instead. 

Rimmer looked almost disappointed with what he got and was seconds away from changing it before the fake Rimmer closed his book and walked over to behind the fake Lister. The two exchanged soft smiles with one another before the Rimmer hugged the Lister from behind. The two then exchanged a quick kiss on the lips before turning their colletive attention back to whatever the Lister had been watching before, the Rimmer still holding onto the Lister. 

The real Rimmer watched it play out in white-faced horror. It was the look you get when you watch a car crash happen right in front of you and you can hear bones crunching alongside the metal. Cat just giggled seeing Rimmer’s reaction, and Lister was just getting flashbacks to the dreams he used to have when the original Rimmer had left. The two of them had kissed! It was so, casual and relaxed. 

Whatever version of reality that Rimmer had selected, was one that looked like the two of them had been together for a long time and had no problem with one another. Not together like they usually were, but together-together. Like a _couple._

Rimmer was blushing hard by the time he took his hand away from the lectern, clearly flustered with what he had just seen and acted like there had been some sort of bug in the programming – I mean, that’s clearly the only real explanation for all of that. Oh yes, of course, he didn’t get to see anything cool, he just got a domestic life with Lister, he already had that and it was horrible. 

At least what Kochanski saw was something that she wanted.

 

* * *

 

Usually, when these sort of missions are talked about, the stuff in-between the plot setup and main action gets cut off. For the people experiencing these things in real time, however, they don’t get that luxury. I’ll still skip over all of it to something much more relevant, I doubt neither of us wants to go over all of that in boring detail. Or maybe you do, I don’t know you and what you like reading about. 

For the time being, the Canaries and their escorts had made a camp over by the ship they had come down in. It was around dinner time once everybody had finally settled down. There was cheap food in even cheaper bento-box styled containers that people were eating out of. It was about the same quality as the food they usually ate if you could even really call any of that mush ‘food.’

 

Kochanski was sitting off to the side by herself. She wasn’t exactly looking at much, but you could see that she had a lot on her mind. 

Lister put the lid back on his ‘food’ and walked up to Kochanski. After what she had seen earlier in the day he had this nagging feeling deep in his gut that he at least needed to check up on her. 

“Hey, uh, how ya feeling?” Lister said casually. Kochanski looked back at him and adjusted her sitting so there would be room for Lister to sit beside her. Lister hesitated for a second, not quite sure if it was fully okay for him to join her. 

Kochanski put her elbow on her knee and chin in her palm. She sighed as Lister took the spot she made for him. “I’m alright.” She said flatly. It was hard to tell if she was being totally honest or not. 

“Ya seem a little out of it,” Lister said, wanting to at least make some sort of effort to make her feel better. There would be no way in hell that he would be okay if he saw something like that. 

“I _feel_ a little out of it,” Kochanski replied with a sigh. 

“How did you guys even get involved with all that dimensional stuff? Made some sort of device?” Lister asked, hopefully to try and get her mind off the topic. That sort of thing worked for him, so it might help with her. 

“Actually, we came across it all,” Kochanski began to explain, “A slipstream of some kind – we reckoned that it could have been left over from some sort of ship that could travel through them. Never found out what made them,” she looked back at Lister, “But there was quite a lot of them. The one I travelled through to get here wasn’t the first that we explored.” 

Lister thought for a moment. “Kinda like Rimmer’s ship.”

Kochanski tilted her head to the side, “Rimmer? What do you mean by Rimmer?”

“Ya know, like, Rimmer.” Lister fiddled around for the right words to say before gesturing to his forehead in an ‘H’ motion. “Me old Rimmer - he didn’t actually die."

“So, he wasn’t a hologram?”

“Oh, Nah, yeah he was. I mean the second time. He left a few weeks before you arrived, actually.”

“I thought that he died? His lightbee got too damaged; Cat told me all about it and how happy he was when it happened.” Kochanski said. 

“I’m the only one who knew what really happened.” Lister began to twiddle his thumbs thinking back to the day that the old Rimmer left. The texture difference between his skin and the touch-sensitive, latex-like material that his right hand was made of still threw him off sometimes. “He left to become this other person, a better version of himself called ‘Ace.’” 

“’Ace,’ huh?” The name felt somewhat familiar to her, but she didn’t know why. A memory? A passing word? She didn’t really know. 

“Some other version of himself. He was some sort of super cool space hero who ended up travelling around dimensions. At some point, the first ‘Ace’ died and kept working as a hologram. According to the Ace that was here before Rimmer took up his spot there was this whole line of Ace after Ace.”

“So, your Rimmer is out there somewhere being a hero now? I’m quite surprised that he has it in him.” 

Lister laughed at that. “Oh yeah, it’s quite hard to stomach. But I can assure you he had it in him – very deep inside of him.” 

“You know; the last time that you were talking about Rimmer so fondly was back when you had that weird dream about him,” Kochanski said with a slight smirk. She was already starting to look a bit better. 

“Hey – hey, I thought we agreed to never speak about that again,” Lister said as he gave Kochanski a playful shove. 

“Do you still miss him?” Kochanski asked with her arm still up after it being pushed, hoping not to step on anything. 

Lister looked back. He bit his lip and slunk his shoulders. “Maybe, but being around the new Rimmer has filled that void for me.” He said with a slight laugh. It was easy to forget that on the surface this was an entirely new Arnie J, he just felt the same. Maybe a little younger and not as tolerant to Lister’s usual smeg, but still Rimmer regardless. 

Lister looked around the group of people around him. His eyes narrowed. “Where is Rimmer, anyways?” Lister didn’t usually keep track of where people were at any given time, but upon thinking about it he noticed that he hadn’t actually seen the man himself for quite a while now. probably not since they all had gotten called back to their rondevu point. 

Kochanski stretched with her arms behind her head. “Probably complaining to somebody about health and safety regulations or something like normal; why do you ask?”

“Nothing, nothing, it just crossed my mind,” Lister said as he picked his food tray back up and ate something of an indeterminate origin.

 

* * *

 

The Canaries' camp for the night wasn’t guarded strongly and didn't have much in the way of stopping people from walking away from it in the middle of the night. All throughout night, people’s beds became wherever the person ended up. It wasn’t like people were intimate with each other, just that the floor and other people’s bodies turned out to be nicer to sleep on. 

Lister woke up to nothing. He hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and this just seemed to be the end of it. He sat up, rubbed his face and took out the good sampling of dreadlocks that had migrated into his mouth. Hair always tasted awful, and it always had a knack for getting right into his face. He had been sleeping against a wall pretty far away from any of the shoddy cots that had been brought with him, and honestly, the floor was an improvement. 

He looked around. The Cat was sleeping in a ball on top of a big storage container, and he knew that Kochanski was on a bunk with some of the other female Canaries, but Lister couldn’t help but shake the feeling that something was missing. 

Rimmer. Rimmer was missing. 

Lister hated himself for even noticing that enough for it to keep him awake. Look; you have to remember that Lister had spent at least half a decade, maybe a tad more, sleeping in the same room as that man, you notice these things. 

Being careful not to disrupt anybody, Lister unplugged his arm (which was the reason he was by the wall, and not just lying on the floor like he usually would be) and stood up with a crack of his joints. The closest guard to him didn’t seem to pay all that much attention, instead opting to listen to a quiet radio show on his ear receiver as he took a long smoke break. Lister took a couple of careful paces over sleeping bodies, grappled the first quilted jacket that he found that wasn’t attached to somebody and rugged himself up. 

 

Lister eventually found himself walking down the cold-white corridors. He didn’t have anything else to do, anyways. The place felt both exactly the same and completely off from the last time he explored everything earlier in the day, It’s funny how things can be like that. He began to walk closer to the large room with the whole mannequin display and slowed his pace as he got closer. Unlike the rest of the ship all of the lights were on. 

It was possible that they had just left it all on, but that didn’t seem all that likely. 

The first thing that Lister had noticed was that the room was on. The second was that Rimmer was in it. Rimmer was standing at the lectern with the program running and the room bright with simulated activity. 

The room was in the form of an officer’s quarters, a fake Rimmer, Cat and Kryten were at the table playing cards together. The real Rimmer was standing there watching them, studying their happiness. The other Rimmer and Lister were sitting next to one another pretty much sharing the same hand with Lister leaning on Rimmer’s shoulder pointing out moves that the other could make. 

The real Lister walked quietly as he could up to Rimmer, he didn’t really know what to do or say at that moment. After a while, he coughed quietly into his fist. 

Rimmer flinched and sharply turned around. It didn’t take a doctor to understand that he hadn’t been sleeping this entire time. Big bags under his brown, glazed-over eyes, his hair had already started to ploof up into his usual, beheaded curls. Rimmer looked like a mess. 

Lister exhaled and clicked his tongue. “I think, that I know why this place was abandoned.” He said contemptuously. Rimmer took his hand off the panel, the vision around them disappearing, animatronic dolls falling back asleep with a familiar ‘thud.’ The room was cold, an uneasy silence fell upon them. Rimmer sighed, his eyes falling back the floor. He didn’t have an excuse for what he was doing, both knew what was going on and neither had to say anything. 

Rimmer especially didn’t want to say anything. It was a mix of admiration and loneliness that had filled him as he watched the other version of him go about his day. Rimmer wanted that for himself. The idea that he was with Lister of all people still disgusted him, but he would be lying to say that he wouldn't be alright with that, even for a little bit. This other Rimmer seemed happy, aged in the same way that Lister and the other two had come back in. He couldn’t say something like that out loud, and he would never forgive himself for it. It wasn’t that he liked Lister at all, but there was something about some other version of himself finally being happy with, something, that just drew him close. 

That was the problem with this place. People would come to see what their lives are like in other versions of time, but would all eventually find the one that fulfilled all of their dreams and get transfixed on either trying desperately to fill that void in them they didn’t know they had, or would just stay there and watch like moths to a light bulb. The technology was an absolute miracle, but it was something that long ago humanity decided they were better off without. 

Somebody like Rimmer was perfect to demonstrate this. Rimmer absolutely hated the idea that some other version of him was living a better life, it just wasn’t fair. But beyond any common sense (what little the man had) he was still utterly captivated by the idea. What seemed to stick out for both of them, however, was that Rimmer, out of everything, had chosen this to watch. Not one where he had everything that he always said that he wanted, not one where he was rich and famous, not as some awesome space hero, but instead something so ordinary and mundane. 

Rimmer brought his body to a weak attention, “I’ve believed you from the beginning, you know.” He admitted quietly, looking back down at his idle hands. They were pale and bony in the harsh, cold lighting that the simulation room gave off. “All that stuff about being put into stasis, space adventures, all of it. I just-” he exhaled, “I don’t know how the hell to even bring that forth without sounding crazy.” 

Lister looked back at Rimmer, putting his hands in his uniform pockets. “So, ya lied to me?”

Rimmer didn’t reply at first. He didn’t want to. Of course he had lied! That seemed to be the only thing he was good at doing. He couldn’t follow simple orders without messing up, he couldn’t last a day in space on his own, there was nothing to him besides failure after constant failure. “I want to help you find out what’s going on, for real this time,” He said looking dead into Lister’s eyes, avoiding the question. Rimmer’s eyes didn’t look real, they seemed to be hollow and artificial, like a hologram or photo. “No more mucking around here.” 

“I think that the best way you can do that is to leave this place,” Lister said carefully. 

Rimmer turned back around at the mannequins on the floor. You could very easily say that it was metaphoric for something. Rimmer, for the first time in his life, exhaled and swallowed his pride. It sat like a well-worn baseball in the base of his neck. “David; that might just be the best idea that you’ve ever had.” 

There was silence between the two of them. It was a cold silence, one that once you experience it you learn to try and avoid it at all cost. If it was possible, it would be fitting for the rain to be pouring outside. The vibe the two shared centrally matched that. The conversation was over, fade to black, play the next scene. 

Lister stretched, “I’ve never really understood you, Rimmer,” he said with a soft chuckle. “I don’t know if I ever will.”

Rimmer stayed quiet. He just remained standing in his place avoiding any more confrontation. 

Lister let his arms fall down with a swing. “Let’s go back to sleep,” he said with a yawn. 

Without a word of protest, the two of them went back to doing just that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all that have stuck around so far, I really do appreciate it. 
> 
> In the next chapter, the story will pick up for real - so hold tight for that.


	9. Something Doesn't Smell Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cat’s seemed to have perked up quite a lot since he found his coat again – I wonder what happened to him during that little adventure in the vents a while ago?

“Your parents?” Rimmer said with a genuine interest in his voice. Rimmer was the type of person to care a lot about one’s breeding. 

“Yeah, I met ‘em.”

“The same parents that abandoned you under a pool table in a pub? Wasn’t that the story?”

“Mhm-hm.” Lister hummed, “They had good reason to do it, completely out of their control.”

“They did want to have him, I believe.” Kochanski piped in. Today was a Tuesday, and the conversation of Lister’s parentage had been brought up as they went home from a pretty uneventful Canary mission. The fact that it was Tuesday doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it was good to know. 

“So you’re just, okay with that?” Rimmer asked Lister bluntly. _He_ wouldn’t have been okay with that. 

“Yeah man, they seemed like pretty cool people,” Lister looked back at Kochanski, “put in a lot of work to try and have me. Life just caught them at a bad time.” 

Kochanski nodded in agreement. 

“They Left You In a Box.” Rimmer said, putting emphasis on each of the words. This whole story didn’t make any sense to him, it felt like they were just taking the smeg. It would be very easy to make up a story about Lister’s origin, but this one just seemed disappointing. Where was the pizazz? The creativity? He could have at least take the time to make up a better one. 

Lister tilted his head side to side. “Again, they had their reasons.” Existing was something that Lister liked to do, he can’t fault himself for having to do something that he was required to do to ensure that he would keep on existing. 

Kochanski gestured with her head to bring Lister over to her. Rimmer unloaded all of his weapons and equipment to be checked over and collected as the two of them talked. “If it ever clicks; keep a note of the time.” She said to him. 

Lister looked back at her puzzled as to what she meant.

“I’ve been keeping track,” Kochanski pointed to the simple watch on her wrist behind her prison band. It was simple enough that it wasn’t deemed a problem for an inmate to have. “I want to see how long it takes before he realises that we’ve been talking about ourselves the whole time.”

“Why?” Lister asked after looking back at Rimmer. He was arguing with the customs officer again. 

Kochanski shrugged. If you can’t mess around with Rimmer, what’s the point of having him around? 

Rimmer waited for Lister to catch up once he was through the gates. Lister put down his own kit and headed towards him with his overalls already half undone. 

“Aren’t you two going to go and have a shower?” Kochanski said after putting her own stuff down for the border control worker to deal with. The main showers were near-ish to the docs so the Canaries could get out of their uniforms and into their prison grab without tracking space muck everywhere. It wasn’t mandatory, but that’s what Kochanski usually did at least. 

“Lister never has a shower,” Rimmer said as he walked away. Lister looked back at Kochanski, shrugged, and walked after Rimmer. The two of them went towards the cell areas and turned the corner chatting about something. 

“Honestly, sometimes it’s like watching an old married couple,” Kochanski said to herself with her arms crossed and soft smile as she watched the other two walk away. 

“What’sthatmean?” Cat replied leaning over to her, saying it as if it was all one word. He had an open coffee cup in his hand, a velvet-red drink was leaking out from the side of it where Cat’s bite marks could be seen. 

“Eh, nothing much.” She looked back at him, and then down at the cup in his hand. “What even is that stuff?” Kochanski asked as she pointed to it. 

Cat gave her a side eye and moved the cup away from her. “It’s mine.” He said after taking a graceful sip of his cup as if it was a glass of fine wine. 

“Yes, I know that.” Kochanski said with a soft roll of her eyes. “But what exactly is it? Some sort of juice?”

Cat looked back into his cup before skulling the rest of it. “Doesn’t matter.” He replied before dumping the now empty cup into a recycling bin by the wall. Cat then went over to try (the keyword being ‘try’) and flirt with a small group of chatting female Canaries as they were stuck in line for re-entry. 

This was the calm before the storm. Kochanski didn’t know this at the time, but she knew it later on. 

Out of nowhere, there was a sound. A scream, a cry, or whatever it was. Echoed through the small docs. People looked around for the source, it seemed to be coming through the vents. 

One of the large overhead vents broke down with a crash. 

A man half rolled - half crawled out of the vents. He landed on all fours, his fingers and toes supporting all of his weight like an animal about to pounce. Right there and then, there was a whole other Cat. Not another one of his kind, but another one of _him_. This second Cat was in a rugged purple floor 13 uniform. His hair had started to mat around the ends and he looks mentally and physically exhausted. The second Cat’s uniform was covered in cuts showing snippets of his skin and had an aura of pain that radiated off him. His teeth were bared; he had waited a great deal of time for this very moment. 

“YOU.” The second Cat barked once he laid eyes on the first. The focus of his anger didn’t have time to say anything or give an explanation. He looked just as shocked as the others, perhaps even more. 

“You have a lot to answer for here, buddy.” The second said coldly as he stood up. 

“Not really.” The first said with a panicked squeak, trying desperately to find something better to say. He looked at Kochanski for some sort of safety net, but she couldn’t give him any. 

The second turned around and grabbed a gun off one of the Canaries that hadn’t yet give it back. The Canary tried to fight it, but by the time he was able to do anything of use the second Cat already had it pointed back at him. The Canary put his arms up and took a half-step back, frantically trying to telepathy signal at least one of the guards to do something. 

The second Cat turned back around with a smooth swivel of his heel and pointed the gun towards the first – fingers on the trigger. 

“Look man, I don’t want any tro-“

“Shut up.” The second Cat said over the first. “You don’t get to say that.” 

The second Cat pulled the trigger on the gun with a cold expression on his face, the first yowled in pain as he fell backwards onto the ground clutching his gut. There was an uneasy quiet that echoed around the ship. The first looked back at Kochanski with fear and pain in his dark eyes and his right hand over his torso. The second just stood his ground; cold vengeance in his eyes and soul. 

He was still panting from the gun’s recoil, his hair was loose and his eyes wide. He was a panther right after it’s kill. The first cat on the floor slowly took his hand off the wound. A thin, dark green and watery slime stuck to his palm and draped over his once immaculate uniform. He looked back at the second Cat, more than a little stunned as to what just happened. 

Kochanski just watched this unfold, the rest of her body freezing up. She had seen that sort of slime before, and she really didn’t want it to mean what she knew that it meant.

 

* * *

 

Every species has instincts that’s just ingrained in their very beings. Whether it’s a newborn lizard knowing to leave its egg and fend for itself or a human being unable to stop itself from throwing stuff at a target, everything’s got it. For Felis sapiens, one of these little quirks was knowing the ins and outs of Red Dwarf like a second nature, because it was. Every twist and turn, all of the vents, it’s pretty easy stuff for all of them. Especially somebody like Cat, who not only grew up in the confines of it’s walls but often spent most of his time just exploring every nook and crevice that the ship had to offer. 

Making his way through the thin and winding vents were nothing at all. 

Even though he didn’t admit it, being forced to be in the prison jumpsuit almost made it easier to stomach going through the dusty old vents. It pained him to realise it but not being in nice clothing meant that there was no risk of your clothes being damaged - as they were already so unbelievably awful. Cat couldn’t stand the prison lifestyle, it was doing him in and he had to get out. At the very least he needed to get changed into something better, make him feel more alive and himself. 

So, he did just that. 

Going through one of the skuttervents, Cat had had already managed to worm his way to the maze and find the vent that took him out to the Cargo Bay. One’s first instinct would be wanting to go to your quarters or wardrobe but would have taken hours. Or, to the hull of the ship where the Starbug wreckage, and if it was all there, and stuff of his might also be. At the very least the crew of the ship would have found the wreckage and salvage the rest of their stuff to give it back at the end of the sentence. They had too, it was only fair. The clothing that he arrived in might be out of bounds for now, as disappointing as that was. 

Once he was able to get the screws of the vent out, Cat jumped out of the vent in a flip, landing on his feet. Ancient Cat ghost cities stretched forever before him. Tunnels carved out of stone waiting to be mined and containers, small sections up high for sleeping in and large crossroads once lined rope for flags or drying clothing sat all throughout the cargo bay. These places had been long abandoned by the time Cat was born, but the smells of the people who once lived in them were still present. Cat didn’t come down here all that much, it made him feel lonely. When he was little he spent a decent amount of time there along with the small handful of Cats that were left, but as they all either left the ship on their own or died off he slowly moved his way to other places on the ship. 

Cat kept on walking through the dark towers. If he had a torch he would be using it to light his journey, but he could see enough to do what he needed to do. The air was stuffy and heavy, the background noise of the ship and his boots echoed throughout. It didn’t occur to Cat at the time how strange it was that the cat cities were around at the same time as the old Red Dwarf crew – he had no reason to assume otherwise, to him that’s just how the ship always had been. Maybe if he did, he could have taken it as a pretty strong cue to go back to the others to tell them and the day would have gone a lot better for him, but he didn’t. 

 

As Cat walked he began to notice that the area seemed to be used more and more. Some of it was even clean, and covered in new wear and tear. Eventually, there was a clearing. Cat stopped before a left over embankment of crates of ore mined eons ago.

Monsters in every size and shape filled the room in makeshift cages. It was impossible to tell what they were, GELFs or disregarded Polymorphs; whatever they where they were not pleasant to be around. Their soft laughter, wales and cries filled the halls, begging for something to come and let them out of their collective misery.

Towards the centre of the room was a large creature about the size of a small bus. It was grotesque; six chubby arms and teeth in a ring on the face of an eyeless head. It looked like a giant dust mite of some kind. It was covered in some sort of hi-tech electronics and thick, plastic transparent tubes. Yellow boiler-suited workers worked around it. Some were controlling the monster in a very hands-on-way, but most stood around to keep watch. 

One of the workers walked up to the creature with a thick syringe in his hands. The creature seemed to see what he was going to do and panicked to no avail. After injecting the fluid into the base of one of its ‘legs’, the worker walked back and pulled a lever to the side. This action triggered the creature’s restraints to grow tighter. 

After a few quiet moments, the creature fell into a rage, thrashing around wildly as it fought against it’s metal constraints. It's crying only grew stronger before an electronic current was sent through its body. A thick, dark orange goop began to get extracted through the tubes and machines that covered it like a science experiment gone wrong. The tubes went up to the ceiling, and then back down to barrels and barrels that other workers had the job of filling. 

The creature slowly calmed down, it’s ‘breathing’ seemed to slow as it regained its self-control. 

A man in a goop-covered hazmat suit at the end of the creature made a loud ‘boo!’ sound, throwing his arms up comically. He was clearly enjoying the situation quite a lot. The monster under his control, however, was not. Twelve, thick, stumpy legs struggling to move its owner into the safety of its tiny cage. 

The creature was scared for its life as he huddled in what it could squish into it. Lights flashed and energy surrounded it before a jolt ruffled through its body. The machine ramped up again, an icy light blue liquid began to be gathered off it. 

“You’re enjoying this way too much,” Called out another man who had been sitting on the top of the cage, his legs dangling down from it. He pressed a large button on the side of his position, long blackout curtains got pulled around the creature’s cage. After a few moments of total darkness, the creature stopped making any noise as it was able to relax. 

“You’re going to get thrown off the ship.” The second man said as he climbed down the ladder by his side. The first just shrugged in response. 

Cat covered his mouth, doing everything in his power not to make a sound. He turned his head to rest on the wall, eyes darting around the place trying to think of what to do. He couldn’t see any weapons, or anything that he could do with one if he had one. Did he go back to the tank? Would he tell the others? Cat didn’t know what to do. 

The two men kept on talking to each other while sitting on a crate to the side. If you could get a good look at the two of them, you could be fairly sure that they were the two workers that almost got hit by the Starbug crash back in chapter 2. 

“I hate all of this synthetic stuff of late, I don’t know why we use it.” The first said as the other workers began to clean up the mess that was left by the extraction process. 

“’Cause it cheaper and we get heaps more out of it, that’s why.” 

“I don’t care, It’s gross.” The first said as he licked a bit of bright pink goop on his sleeve. 

“You’re gross,” The second said with an eyeroll. 

“Look, if they’re just going to use those viruses, they could at least do something good with them. It can’t be _that_ hard.” 

“I don’t control the rate at which humans crash land on the ship with ‘magic emotion viruses.’ Consider yourself lucky they had them on them in the first place.” 

“God, why do we even keep those _things_ around?” The first said with a slight chuckle. 

“Not sure, but at least the uniforms are neat.” The second man said looking down at his own suit. It wasn’t as messy as his partner’s, but still showed its age.

“Nah, you’re just good at pulling it off.” The first said with an absent-minded stretch. “We have to feed them and everything, so that’s annoying.”

“At least you don’t have to be around them.”

“Hah, very true.” The first said with relief. That just sounded exhausting. 

“Although, if we do keep producing at this rate we’re going to end up being used to repair the ship instead.” 

“Eesh, no thanks.” 

Cat had been watching the two of them talk for a while before realising that he was being watched.

“Hey.” A man in uniform said about half a meter away from Cat’s face. This made the Cat jump in his place and ears to turn downwards. 

“Hi there!” Cat replied, louder than he planned to be. 

The two workers that had been talking looked back over at the Cat, and then to each other. There was an exchange of large gestures that could be translated as ‘did you notice him?’ ‘no, I was talking to you!’ between the two of them. They moved in just close enough to see what was going on, but not enough to be seen watching. 

“What'cha doin’?” The guard said. He was in the same uniform as the guards that had escorted Cat and the others around when they had first landed on the ship.

Cat didn’t have much of a response. “Just lookin’ around, you know how it is.” He managed to compose out of fear. 

“I don’t think that you’re allowed to be doing that.” The guard said, leaning down slightly so the two of them were at eye level. Cat was by no means a short cat, but he was quite short in comparison. 

“You know what? I think that you’re right! I’ll go back to prison, now.” Cat said with a smile. 

The guard put his hand on Cat’s shoulder and gripped it tightly. 

His arm seemed to grow long and spindly, before it morphed into a dark green goo in a wave through his body, followed by the goo hardening back into the skin colour and clothing that matched Cat’s. He was identical. This new Cat, this other Cat, smiled again, showing off his new feline teeth. The first Cat, the real Cat, stepped back, heart racing pumping cold blood through his veins. 

In summary, he was kind of, well, he was fucked. 

“Hey listen bud, I don’t want any trouble here.” The real Cat said, hands up. 

The metal wall behind him quickly turned to a soft, plastic texture. Long, tentacle-like pillars came out and gripped him so tight it was impossible for him to escape. Cat tried to call out, but one of the tentacles had covered his whole face. The new Cat then stretched it’s back and morphed again, a large black and white fur coat now covering it’s purple convict grab. 

If Cat wasn’t panicking already, this would be a great time to start. 

The wall seemed to swallow him whole, Cat moved through it like water before being thrown to the wall with a thud. By the time he had lifted his head enough to see where he had come from the wall had turned into strong bars. The new Cat was looking down at him, hands in stolen pockets. It squatted down. 

“Are ya’ happy now?” it said as if it was mocking its prey. It spoke with the Cat’s voice, but not in the same way that Cat spoke. It was a cold rendition and butchering of it all. It was like it didn’t care to use the same energy as Cat did, it didn’t need to. 

“Hey man! Let me out of here!” Cat said as he moved up and tugged on the cold bars of the cage. Cat was in a cage of the bottom level, he didn’t even get a proper floor – just the concrete of the cargo hull and whatever grit and grime that came with it. 

“God - do you know how annoying Cats are to deal with? Ever had to deal with a full crew of Born-Again Blue Hats? Do you know how difficult those things are to get rid of and out of your face?” The new Cat, paused, and then looked back at the first. “Of course you don’t. The only thing in that sorry excuse for a mind is shirt patterns and insults for your crewmates,” It said as if it was offended on Cat’s behalf. 

Cat closed his mouth and bit down hard. That wasn’t true. 

The new Cat clicked it’s fingers and pointed to the two workers who had been watching from afar. “You two,” He called out, rolling the Cat’s voice around in it’s mouth, “Look after this one.” 

The first worker’s face changed to the sigh of somebody who had just called out a dramatic ‘this couldn’t get any worse!’ in the middle of a thunderstorm before his house burst into flames and was already calculating how much it would cost to repair. He just had to open his big mouth, huh?

 

The new Cat walked down the hall, strides long as it got used to new legs. When it got to a mirror it admired itself much in the same way Cat usually did. It ran long figures though it’s hair and made it’s hands down to it’s collar, fixing it up to achieve perfection. It coughed into it’s hand and affixed a broad smile onto its face. 

It walked towards the sound of a small group of people, an argument was going on between two of them. After waiting for the perfect moment, it jumped in with all of the energy that it could muster up. “Takes more than that to keep Mister Kay-Ay-Tee away!” it called out to the people in the room, gleefully popping his collar out with a flamboyant spin.

 

* * *

 

“Oi-“ the first Cat managed to blurt out, not really having anything better to say at that moment. His hand was covered in the slime, and more was pouring out of him and onto the floor. 

“Oi yourself!” The second replied with a sabre-toothed snarl. “You don’t get to ‘oi’ me.” Their conversation was starting to loop. “You put me in a _cage!_ I couldn’t shower, I barely got to eat, it was torture!” the second Cat began to pace. The gun in his arm made a ‘ping’ to alert him that it was charged back up. He looked back at the first. “YO-“

The second Cat suddenly clutched his neck in pain with a loud, painful yowl, a jolt of energy caused him to fall to the ground. He dropped the gun as it happened, the sound of it hitting the floor creating an unpleasant echo. The second Cat tried to claw at the base of his neck to no avail from the pain. 

The first was still on the floor, arm to the side of his chest as he breathed deeply. Kochanski looked at both of them, her hand moving up to the same spot on her neck that the new Cat got jolted from. She could feel the chip that was inserted into her neck to regulate inmate emotions. The first Cat didn’t seem to be affected by a chip of his own. 

Two of the prison guards cocked their guns and began to walk carefully towards the second Cat as he withered in pain. Nobody seemed to give any thought to the first who was still ‘bleeding’ out. 

The second dug his claws into the ground and bared his teeth in pain. His eyes had started to water before he reached over to his fallen gun and shot one of the guards at point blank. He got pushed back as she fell with a grunt. The second guard put his gun up and joined one of the many red target lasers that joined in covering the Cat. The other prisoners got their weapons and apprehended, those already in the check-in got taken back into the tank as the whole port very quickly and efficiently got put into lockdown. 

The first Cat got back up, the wound on his toro stitched itself up with a wet crinkling sound. He slowly and carefully got behind the second guard as she got ready to call the order to shoot if it has to come to that. “Put your gun down.” She said sternly. Cat’s hands didn’t budge. 

Now it came to the point that Kochanski needed to make a decision. Here she was, standing there after seeing a crewmate of hers getting shot by a double of the said crewmate. The first version of him, instead of being blood and guts all over, was instead oozing out an insect-like green slime. And not only that, the second one showing quite clearly that he had a working RGC chip in his neck, with the second one showing no sign of this. 

Interestingly, he seemed to be showing injury much like a polymorph does when shot. 

Kochanski looked around at all the commotion going on. She knew very well as to what a party-shot Polymorph looked like, and by the looks of it, everybody else in that hanger did too. They weren’t fazed at all. 

All of these people were alive and buzzing around like normal. Do you know what’s normal for the crew and passengers of Red Dwarf, three million years into the future? Not be alive, that’s what. 

“Hands up.” A guard shouted as she pointed her gun towards Kochanski. “You’re coming along with me.” 

Kochanski carefully put her hands up and looked back towards the guard. “What are my chargers?” 

“Conspiracy.” Came a controlled reply. 

“What am I conspiring?” Kochanski asked calmly. 

“This!” Cat’s voice called out before his gun shot the guard who had her gun on Kochanski. When she fell, rupture of green slime from the wound and all, she let go of her weapon and it skidded on the floor towards Kochanski’s feet. 

Kochanski picked up the weapon and armed herself. She and Cat, the real Cat, made eye contact and nodded. You could see a tiny jolt of electricity had gone through the Cat, a small shudder making his hair fizz back up again. His gun pinged again. 

“Don’t move!” yet another prison guard said to the two of them over the sound of the lockdown alarm. Cat took a few steps towards Kochanski. 

“I said don’t move!” He repeated. Kochanski hoister her gun up closer and practically marched towards the Cat. One she got closer she turned her back on Cat, and he did the same. The two of them now were able to cover half the distance between them. 

Kochanski leaned her head back towards Cat. “You’re really not helping your case, here.” 

“You got a better plan?” Cat said through clenched teeth. 

Kochanski quickly looked around the room, and then back at the cat. “Leg it.” She ordered, voice much calmer than either of them actually were. 

 

To cut a long story short: Cat and Kochanski found themselves now running down the now empty hallway. They still had their guns, and everybody else that would usually be there were all gone. Their cover had been blown, no point in hanging around role-playing as prisoners. Kochanski put her arm on Cat’s shoulder to match his pace. “What happened to you?” 

“Big farm or something! I don’t know! I just kinda wandered into it.” Came Cat’s disjointed reply. 

“Farm? A farm for what?”

“I don’t know!” Cat repeated with a crack in his voice. He stopped in his tracks and looked back at her. “All that I know is that they locked me up when I found it!” He moved in closer, “I was there for _weeks._ The only reason I was even able to hightail it out of there was because some dude left it open as he was feeding me!” 

A dude who ‘accidently’ left the gate open after many long weeks of having to deal with Cat in captivity. Think of a fussy cat in a vet who absolutely does _not_ want to be there, but around 60 times worse - and he can also speak. By the end of it, they pretty much had to kick him out by force just to save all of their collective sanity. Naturally, this would lead to Cat alerting the others about jeopardizing everything - but it was a calculated risk. 

Kochanski had absolutely no idea this had happened. She felt horrible. When did this happen? When they first got separated right after they crashed onto the ship? She sure hoped not. 

“Cat, look, it’s going to be okay,” Kochanski said with her hands on his shoulders. Cat was bending down slightly to allow this to happen. He was shaking, weeks of frustration still forcing its way out. 

“It’s not going to be okay! My hair’s all matted! Does that sound okay!? I’m going to end up with dreadlocks like Lister!”

It was clear to Kochanski that the Cat was at the onset of a full-blown panic attack. It clearly wasn’t all about his hair, but that just seemed to be the item that he ended up assigning to express the mess of emotions swirling around in his mind. She had never seen Cat like this, it wasn’t a pretty sight. 

“Hey, hair’s an easy fix.” Kochanski said as calmly as she could. 

“No it’s not! Do you have any idea how long it takes for my hair to grow?” Cat said with a shake in his voice. 

“Oh, you can pull off short hair, it would be a great look for you.”

Cat’s irises began to dilate in fear. 

“You could absolutely pull off a fade, or something along those lines.” Kochanski tried to assure him. She could only hope that she hadn’t just made it worse. 

“Ya think?” Cat responded. 

“I do.” Cat could pull off any hairstyle. Kochanski reoriented herself. “We need to keep moving.” 

“How do I know you’re real and not some polymorph or something – or-or whatever those things were?” Cat asked. He didn’t know what to believe anymore. 

Kochanski paused for a moment. She looked around the hall for something that would answer his question. There was nothing. She looked back at the Cat. “You’re just going to have to trust me.” She said trying to give the Cat something to anchor himself onto. 

There was so much going on at once Cat could hardly cope. You could see that in his eyes. 

“Look, what matters now is that we need to go and get the others,” Kochanski said with a newfound tone of authority in her voice. Cat looked back at her and nodded. They all needed to get out of there, stat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ding-dong, it’s plot advancement time. I said the vents would come back into play. If it helps, this might better explain what Cat saw in the last chapter and why it wasn’t ‘Cat’ exactly. Still saw themselves, but that self wasn’t a cat by any means. And the “I could be an alien’ bit. That counts as foreshadowing, right? 
> 
> And another small note, in ‘Can of Worms’ Polymorh’s died with an explosive green, something, when shot. I’m going to go ahead and assume that’s how they’re all like.


	10. Oh, fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no excuse as to why this took me so long to update. Action scenes are hard.

An echoing explosion sounded around the ship. The first Polymorph was dead, defeated by its prey.

_Pathetic._

A man with no anger, another with no fear, a cat with no vanity and a robot with no guilt. As it’s guts and innards got sprayed around the cargo bay the prey’s not-quite-digested emotions spewed back out and back into the original owners. The second of the lot, a much smaller juvenile, waited inside of the pod it had been contained in, taking the form of a loose spanner at the bottom. Outside wasn’t safe, it knew, if the first wasn’t able to survive then what chance did it have? It didn’t know how it knew this, it just did. Instinct is strong in a Polymorph’s blood. 

In deep space, survival was vastly more important than defeating your villains. One of the main drives of the Polymorph was to blend in and survive in this way; that was one of the reasons it had evolved to be able to shift and transform like they could. Oh, that and being able to get the best reactions out of its prey. Three million years of evolution had left the species as apex as a species could ever possibly get. 

The second polymorph fell into a deep hibernation like it had been in for thousands of years before. It just had to wait it out. It took the form of a replacement part for a Blue Midget during this long slumber. It had no choice, but it knew deep down inside of itself that it couldn’t stay that way forever. 

Eventually, the ship was left abandoned. The crew had gone down to investigate a terraformed ocean moon. If you do remember, dear reader, this was the mission that afterwards, left them stranded without their mothership. 

The polymorph stirred. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. It tried stretched, but quickly found it was unable to. It tried to turn into a ball of some kind to bounce somewhere better, but it couldn’t. Something was inside of it. Lots of things were inside of it. There was nothing that it could do about it. 

The polymorph cracked and snapped back into its original form, but even then it couldn’t manage it all the way. It was too weak. It’s body had already been deprived of any and all resources. 

There was a creek, and then a bubble. 

_Ke-losh._

Four small, highly instinctual baby polymorphs cut and clawed their way out of the metal coating of their host. With nowhere to deposit its eggs in time, the second polymorph had no choice but to become the host itself. The act of being torn from the inside out had killed it, leaving it forever in the monstrous form it had been stuck in for the last couple of weeks as it’s parasites grew and took every piece of stored up emotion out of it. It was a pretty gruesome sight that left no mercy for the mother. 

The babies quickly split from one another, taking on various forms and shapes to manoeuvre their ways around the strange new world that they had found themselves in. With the eggs grown it’s life cycle was complete. 

Quiet fell around the ship once more, but it wasn’t to last. With nothing on the ship excreting any lifesigns or emotions, the morphlings eventually found one another. 

The electronic life on the ship didn’t offer much. The vending machines and lifts were all too one-note and the only thing that skutter’s ever felt was a pretty concentrated emotion that could be translated as ‘fuck you’ and not much else. 

The fourth of the morphlings was the largest in its basic form, and was the first to attack one of its siblings. It was also the youngest of the lot, but that didn’t change much. It’s snarl was strong and it’s teeth long. It was starving, all of them were starting. They all knew about the fight to come. It’s shadow cast long and high onto large storage crates. Most of them empty, many of them not. The fourth turned the corner, sniffing out the first. What it didn’t sniff out, however, was the fact that it was waiting for it. 

The polymorph was kicked in the head and back into a large storage crate, the lid of which slid down on the force of the impact. It made a sound as anger rose all the way through it. It formed and scraped to its feet, large teeth grew at the same time that it used to snarl at its attackers. Tendrils lashed out of the cage, their owner far too emotional to use them to get out. 

For the other three, anger became their first real meal. The youngest of the lot was left drained and weak, subsided for the time being. It had happened so fast the youngest didn’t have any time to react or prevent it. 

 

Holly awoke from her computer sleep, the main screen in the drive room changed from the stock animation to her slightly startled face. Her scans showed lifeforms, but there was no sign that anybody had docked. Strange, that didn’t sound right. 

A wisp of rouge, almost organic data found its way through miles and miles of computer terminals. Data with a sole, simple job. Holly tried her best to try and counter it, or at the very least, get some sort of message out to the rest of her crew. Cables and motherboards all over the ship began to fizzle and melt before her very own sensors. 

Holly was gone. Holly was gone and there was nothing that anybody could do about it. 

 

One of the two remaining babies, reading the faint, but lingering sci-imprint left around the ship twisted and changed its body to match. Call it camouflage, call it whatever you want to call it. With new hands it had no idea how to move, it grabbed onto a container for support so it could stand on legs it had equally no idea how to use. The other siblings copied, but changed into another person. Both looked at each other, no words needing to ever be exchanged. They could read and see the other’s thoughts and emotions, or the polymorph equivalent to that. Their forms were that of Cats. The second returned not long after, first as radio waves and then another cat to match. 

There was an uneasy quiet between the three of them. Even though it was far, far above their comprehension as a species, and all instinct told them not to do it, they had learned, or really were forced to learn pretty quickly that they would have to work together for the betterment of all of them. It would be more than easy to fight each other and leave a sole survivor – but that was the problem. Sole. You can last a long time in the deep of space, but not forever. You need to eat. 

For the first time in Polymorph history, a civilization was about to be made.

Over the decades that Red Dwarf was unoccupied, their numbers grew. Runts of litters spared, used for food and breeding, the rest simulated as part of the replacement crew for whenever they were needed and to keep the ship up and running. With time, the runted groups stopped being spared pretty quickly into the small civilization's lifespan, but instead breed into a sort of; sub species of them all. Polymorphs had learned to farm, and farm they did. Over the 200 plus years that the real crew had been in deep sleep and trying to catch up to the ship, the polymorphs grew and adapted to their new tribal lifestyle on board the ship, much like the Cats did beforehand. In fact, the polymorphs had spent most of those 200 plus years taking the forms of these Cats – all without the pointless wars. 

When the ship needed to be manned completely, a real crew came out of the scattering of lifeforms. The polymorph tribe had encountered many foes this way, all believing that they were, in fact, nothing more than a mining ship and small prison. Blue and Red Hat cat allegiances, GELFs, you name it. 

If anything, it was sort of foolproof. Even the very people who used to work on the ship – Lister and Kochanski – couldn’t tell, what was the risk of others’ finding out? 

 

And now, dear reader, that leaves us to the present. 

You see, this plan works very well when it’s all polymorphs on the ship. So, it came as quite a surprise when another ship crash-landed inside of it one groggy morning. Not only was it new people, but new people that knew a lot about how the ship once operated. It was probably the best day of all of their short history. 

Of course, there had been a Kochanski and a Lister double on the ship long before the real ones had shown back up at the beginning of the story, they were important parts of the crew. Well, Lister hadn’t been that important, but they had to give credit to him at least – almost all of the impressions of the old crew had come from him. These had been the freshest and strongest. Once the real versions of the two better impressions could be taken from both to spread through the crew with the telepathic knowledge that they had company. All that could fit themselves into roles, and those that couldn’t took the forms of other objects in the background or stayed out of the way. 

But, there was still the problem of these new creatures being on board, creatures that didn’t intend on leaving anytime soon. 

As luck would have it, Kochanski was already well versed with all of the rules and policies of the ship – including all to do with the Hull. Not only did she know about it, but knew how much you had to do to get sent down to it, and she had inadvertently been a part of that. All that the polymorph crew had to do was just let that happen, and since she and the others had not only broken another rule (well, just Lister) and made pretty good track in leaving the ship, that wasn’t nearly as hard as it could have been. Everything just sort of, worked itself out. 

Unbelievable luck all around, sometimes the universe is just nice to you. 

Of course, this had led to Rimmer being incarcerated, too; but two birds with one stone is still two dead birds.

 

* * *

 

While the events of the last chapter were playing out, Lister and Rimmer had been having their own conversation back in their cell. 

"-Well I'm still missin’ an arm. You can’t top that!" Lister said with triumph, holding his right arm out. It would be more effective if he wasn’t in a long-sleeved uniform, but his point was still the same. 

Rimmer crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. "Have I ever told you one of my eyes is made of glass?" 

"What? Nah, you're havin’ me on." Lister leaned in, "Which one?"

"The left one.” Rimmer chuckled as he reminisced, “I lost it as a small child after a stray bullet from one of Frank’s BB-guns. My brothers always got a kick out of stealing it so they could use it in their marbles games." 

Lister blinked a couple of times and studied Rimmer’s left eye. "So, you're serious then?" He asked softly. 

Rimmer snorted loudly and laughed an ugly laugh. "Of course not. That would be something though, wouldn't it? Could make for a good chat up line."

"Ah yeah.” Lister said as he backed off a little, “Walk up to a bird and say. _‘I've got my eye on you, Love,’_ then drop it in her lap. Do you think Arkerman ever did that?"

“Well, knowing Arkerman, I think that your three-second consideration just then was more effort than he’s ever put into his romantic life.”

“Which one of you is ‘Lister’?” A man in uniform with a fluro clipboard asked as he walked into their cell. 

Both inmates were at their table comparing scars and the stories behind them at the time, Lister with his jumpsuit undone all the way down showing off his skutter-given caesarean scar that seemed to top anything that Rimmer was able to pitch. He had been trying to prove (at the time he undid it) that it was more impressive than the stump that used to be his arm, but Rimmer wasn’t buying it. He kept going on about how it’s not about what the scar looked like, but the ‘honer’ involved in receiving them. Considering Rimmer’s arsenal of scars that he was willing to show, Lister was still winning in that department. 

“Uh, me,” Lister said as he climbed down from the table and struggled to button up his uniform. The guard at the door chose to ignore what they were doing before he arrived and waited impatiently. 

“You’re wanted for something.” The guard said as he gestured with his body language for the two of them to leave. 

 

The two of them walked down the long corridor together. Left and right to them where quite, unsteering cells. 

“They’ve been going through the tech that was on board that stolen Starbug, and we’ve been informed that you’re the best person to ask about all of that.” He continued reading the notes on his board. Lister was walking next to him, hands by his side.

“Oh, Kryten knows all about that techy smeg.” Lister said. Lister considered himself to be more of a man of action and not of the details. 

“Yes, but I’ve been asked to bring the other _human_ involved up. Officer Kochanski said it was your area when she got called up for the same reason earlier today.” 

“Yeah, alright, that’s fair.” Lister shrugged. 

The sound of gunshots echoed through the hallway. Lister and the guard exchanged confused looks. He moved his hand to his holster, not knowing what to expect. The hair on the back of the guard’s neck began to rise up, but there was nothing he could do about his post and escort. 

“Hey guys,” Lister couldn’t help but saying as Kochanski and Cat came half running into view. There wasn’t much time for much else before Cat fired the gun in his hands, causing both Lister to scoot to the side out of the way and the guard to be forced back with a crunch as the energy rippled through him. Lister held onto his panicked breath as he looked both at the injured guard and Cat and Kochanski to the side. It was a mixed expression of fear and about 30 layers of confusion. 

“Ya not safe here, bud.” Came a purr from the cat. 

“I think that I feel safer around him!” Lister called out, tugging on a dreadlock and looking at the carnage that used to be that prison guard. Green goop was pouring out of his wounds as he lay winded and half-dead on the floor making a moaning sound of death. In retrospect, Lister was rather together for somebody who had just seen another person get shot, unprompted, right in front of him. 

“Too bad. He’s a polymorph.” Cat said after waiting for his gun to recharge. 

“A what?” Lister said, still not fully grasping what had just happened. 

“Shapeshifting bug thing.” Cat replied in a very direct tone of voice. The shape-shifting bug thing that had just gotten shot made a creaking sound as its body stopped being able to hold its form anymore. His arm seemed to break off and his head melted into the floor. 

“Since when?” Lister blurted out with a vocal squeak. 

“Since always. We need to go.” Kochanski replied in a very matter-of-fact tone as she gestured for the three of them to keep going. 

“Hang on! Can one of you explain what’s going on?” Lister barked out as he tried his best to catch up with what the hell was happening. 

 

The three of them kept on running through the prison corridor, and came to a sharp halt before Kochanski’s cell. They had come to a halt because a woman’s voice had called out. 

“Ah, Kristine, you’re back.” Came a woman’s voice from on top of the prison bunk. Kochanski froze. By the way that everybody had been moving, she was the only one visible when you looked through the doorway. 

_Smeg, she’s still here._

Kochanski’s roommate was lying on the top bunk, a book that wasn’t-at-all just porn was resting on her chest. She was looking over at Kochanski by the doorway with an eyebrow raised and her arms behind her head. “How was the mission?”

Kochanski looked down at her Canary uniform, and then back at her roommate. “Fine, it was fine.” She was able to say sharply. 

“That’s good,” The roommate said as if she didn’t really care either way. 

Kochanski handed her gun to Lister, careful to make sure that her roommate didn’t see it. It would probably be very obvious what she was doing, but that didn’t really matter either way. Fear and instinct does weird things to your foresight. 

“Are you free?” Kochanski’s roommate said as she sat up and put her book down. Strands of bushy hair fell into her face, but she didn’t seem to care or even acknowledge it. 

“Ah, well-”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a while now, actually.” The roommate continued, not caring about Kochanski’s objection. She jumped down from her top with a graceful ‘thud.’ “We never talk, we should do that more often.” The roommate continued as she closed in with her hands in her uniform pockets. 

“Yes, maybe we should at some point,” Kochanski said, trying to go back the way she came. 

“You’re not busy, are you?” The roommate asked. Kochanski wasn’t getting away that easily. 

“A little,” Kochanski said with the type of smile that you give a crying toddler that you’ve been forced to sit next to a long flight. 

“I can tell.” Kochanski’s roommate said with her own smile. Her legs seemed to grow long from under her pant legs and melt into the floor, and then come back up in tendrils of the same material that the floor was covered in. Kochanski began to fight it, but was thrown to the floor with a thud. 

Kochanski banged her head with a loud swear before attempting to get back up and skutter away. There was a new figure now standing before her, one that took Kochanski a long second to realise was an exact copy of her own. Maybe with a little more bloodlust in her eyes, but otherwise exactly the same. 

It became a Kochanski on Kochanski fight. Both were pretty damn evenly matched. One Kochanski threw a punch, and the other was able to catch and quickly return it with her other arm. A chair was almost used as a weapon by one of them, but not much came of it as the chair processor was thrown against a wall and met with a blow to the diaphragm. 

Lister had seen the fight progress after hearing it begin with a yell. He moved back and rested his back on the wall to try and ready himself. Lister cocked the gun and ran into the cell ready for the worse possible outcome. 

One Kochanski was on top off the other in a deadlocked. “David!” the one on the floor said, looking back at Lister with terrified eyes. The one on top also looked back at Lister, the distraction enough for the one on the bottom to kick her off. 

Lister posed his gun up with the viewfinder to his eye. He moved the gun back and forth between the two Kochanskies. 

_Oh yes. Of course this sort of thing was going to happen._

The one that had been on top was on the ground almost on her back in a psudo-crabwalking pose. The Kochanski that had called out turned around to face Lister fully. 

Lister tried to find something cool to say, but he wasn’t really enough in the mindset to be together enough to find it. 

“David, it’s me, I’m the real one,” Said the Kochanski closer to the back wall as she sat there and caught her breath.

“Oh, don’t you do this, we don’t have time for this,” The one on the floor said as she looked back at her double. “You can’t honestly believe that, can you?” She said as she turned back towards Lister. 

Lister’s hand didn’t stray from his gun’s trigger. 

The Kochanski on the floor stood up, her hand over what could have been a broken rib. She looked Lister dead in the eyes with her own, “Lister, please, look at me. You wouldn’t kill me like that, would you?” She pleaded with them. 

Lister looked at her, and then at her double one more time before he fired at the one standing. 

The force of the electric pulse rippled through Kochanski, cutting a hole out of the side of her body. The Kochanski furthest away had put her hands over her head to brace herself for the fire, and took her hands off slowly after the shot. The hole in her double oozed out a thick green slime, the rest of her not looking much better. 

Lister got ready to shoot again the moment he was able too, but the Polymorph lunged herself at him, causing him to drop the gun as he fell to the floor as the force of her attack knocked him down along with it. 

The Polymorph’s weight was all on Lister’s right arm as he instinctively used it to try and shove her off him. The tightest part of her grip was on the charging port, her violence towards it and him forcing it to loosen up after loosening with an aggressive twist. 

In an act of both stupidity and bravery, Lister braced himself with a clench of his teeth and pressed down three of the notches at the base of his arm and discharged of its reserved power at once. A huge jolt of energy ran through Lister’s right arm and straight into the Kochanski that had been on top of it. She screamed an inhuman scream as it coursed through her body. 

Lister used up all the strength that he could muster up to undo his still-live arm through his collar and throw it onto the ground through his sleeve. The machine began to whir around on the ground as envelopes of power came off and around it in slow glows of blue. Lister clutched the end of his real arm and panted, the polymorph that had been throw to the ground didn’t sound any better. ‘Smeg’ was a good approximation of what Lister was able to say though a couple of heavy breaths. ‘Smeg’ would also be a good approximation of what Kochanski would have said, if she didn’t just witness herself get electrocuted to death and wasn’t all that in a commentary mood. 

Lister’s right arm was on the ground, it squirmed at the joints and cried a suspiciously-polymorph-like cry with the power coursing through it before suddenly freezing and dying right there on the floor with a quite ‘clank.’ 

The polymorph didn’t look like Kochanski anymore. Well, she sort of did. It was a distortion of her, a lookalike that didn’t seem to be able to quite get it all right. Softer features, lighter hair, but still all frazzled up and not all there. And eye blinked, and then another on the same side after it appeared. The extra eye disappeared before the one on the other side blinked on it’s own. 

The polymorph brought her arms up to her head and clicked it back into place with a wet ‘crunch.’ Her form wasn’t quite right, but she couldn’t give one single shit about that anymore.

 

* * *

 

Rimmer sat at the table half lost in thought. 

He pulled down a ringlet in his fringe, just to see how long it had gotten. It reached down well past his eyes. This was surprising for quite a few reasons, mostly that Rimmer had no idea that his hair was actually that long. He had needed a haircut for quite a while now, but never really got around to it as the longer his hair got the fuller his curls got, making it hard to tell that it had even grown. Plus, the prison barber was pretty scary, and only seemed to give buzzcuts. Lister could pull off a buzzcut, maybe Rimmer could try one? It couldn’t hurt, and would get rid of the curls for quite a while. His whole life he had the same haircut, even the same thin track down his left side.

Rimmer wondered about the track for a little bit before he got up from the table and looked around. You can be surprised by how fast you can become bored with nobody around to bother. He ducked his head out of the doorway, and left in the other direction that Lister had been taken. 

It took a couple of moments for Rimmer to notice, but everything was quite – not a single prisoner or guard in sight. He stopped once he got to the cafeteria and found himself idly standing somewhat in the centre. He began to think. Given the evidence around him, that there had been a call to abandon the ship. Of course, this didn’t make any sense, he would have heard it happen, for one. Or at least have been told by that guard when he came to take Lister for that interview. 

Usually one’s reaction to this sort of thing might be anger or confusion, but for Rimmer it was more acceptance in the form of a slow, drawn-out exhale. It was the exhale of a man who, after waiting in a que for seven solid hours, was just told he had to go and fill out another set of forms and go to the back of the line. 

Rimmer walked over to the half-abandoned food counter, climbed over the counter and took a carton of something from a crate. He opened it after a longer-than-humorous fight with the cardboard tag, took a sip, and promptly gaged it all back up. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and dumped the drink carton on the counter. With that mild curiosity settled he kept going on his journey to figure out where everybody was. 

Calling out into the hallways didn’t do much to help either. This caused Rimmer to find himself sort of drifting around, and he almost walked right out of the tank before he heard the faraway echo of what sounded of an electrical explosion, causing him to turn around to try and listen to it properly. He paused with one finger up in the air for a good moment before carefully making his way towards the source. It was either certain death or an explanation, either worked for him.

 

* * *

 

The polymorph took to her footing, her hair and uniform loose. There was a beat as both she and Lister gathered their breath. How the thing was still alive was baffling to both of them, the being still being able to fight on pure adrenaline alone. 

She lunged back at him, and it was quickly met with a full face of Lister’s boots. This caused her to be forced back, giving the real Kochanski enough time to pick up a metal chair and bash her over the head with it. The polymorph made another sound of pain before Kochanski looked down at Lister on the floor, death in her eyes. “RUN.” She shouted before running to Lister and pulling him up by his collar. Lister didn’t even get enough time to stand up before he started to get dragged out of there. 

“Cat! Come on!” Kochanski called as the human two turned out of the doorway and down the hall. Cat joined, easily picking up and matching their pace. “Change of plan.” She shouted to both. 

“Yeah, that’s fair.” The Cat replied with his eyes unblinking and happy to get out of here. The three of them kept on running. They had to get out of the tank as fast as possible. 

 

“How did you know that one wasn’t me?” Kochanski said as she matched Lister’s speed. 

“Pardon?” Lister replied as he tried to establish in his mind what was going on with his half burnt sleeve and lack of arm. He hadn’t been able to process what had just happened fully, he needed to take a breather and make heads or tails of what the smeg was going on. But he couldn’t do that, he was running for his life and trying to get off the ship. 

“That other me, how did you know it was the polymorph?”

“I didn’t, really.”

“Oh! that’s very awe-inspiring.” 

“Look! It’s not like I have much say in the matter, you’re the one who it copied and attacked!” 

“Hey! The last time we had to deal with these fuckers it almost cost all of our lives. Oh sure, It starts out with some spare pen somewhere but then it ends up almost destroying the ship and everybody in it.” Kochanski cursed bitterly. “Give it enough time you’re stuck having to repair both a mechanoid and a lightbee with you dealing with spending the rest of your spare time in the medibay both trying to fix yourself and treating a Cat that wound up pregnant with even more of them!” She finished with a loud exhale. The whole ordeal already and the accidental speech she just gave had clearly opened up what she felt about this particular kind of GELF. 

Cat put his hand around his stomach. “I, what?” Came out a weak meow. He would never be informed about the event that Kochanski had been referring too. That was probably for the best. 

“We killed the one we faced ages ago, didn’t we? It got blown up!” Lister affirmed. It was like, a whole entire thing when it happened to them. Lister looked back at Kochanski. “Why would they do all of this?”

“Survival, I would assume,” she replied bitterly. 

“But the entire smeggin’ crew?”

“Who else? Who would expect that? We didn’t even notice and we _are_ the real crew!” Kochanski replied. There was too much on her mind right now to want to try and figure out the exact ins and outs of it all. 

Lister began to slow his pace before outright stopped in his tracks. The other two stopped and looked back in a very _‘what are you doing?’_ manor. 

There was a pause. 

“Rimmer’s one of them.” He said quietly looking at the floor. He clenched his one remaining fist. “He’s been one of those fuckers the whole entire time.”


	11. Thanks for Nothing

“Rimmer’s one of them.” Lister said behind clenched teeth. “He’s been one of those fuckers the whole entire time.”

Kochanski and Cat exchanged looks. The realisation hit them both at the same time. 

“All this time I—“

Kochanski tried to get the group to move forward with a pull of her head. “We don’t have time to get mad, let’s go.”

Lister looked back at her. “I’m going to kill him.”

Kochanski’s face grew stiff. “What?”

“You heard me.” Lister said pushing himself between Cat and Kochanski. 

“Lister, wai—“

 _“He_ got us into this whole prison mess!” Lister said with a snarl as he turned back around to face the other two. “That bastard has been lying to us this whole time!”

Cat put his hands out. “They all did! That’s just what they do.”

Lister gave him a glare. “You don’t under- you know what? Smeg it.’ He cocked the gun on his hip, looked at Kochanski and Cat, and bolted out of there. It took a moment and a half for the other two to realise what had just happened, the pair quickly following suit. 

Down the corridor he marched, a single goal in mind. He ran faster than the other two were able to catch up with, and was able to get enough of a lead for them to lose him completely at a T intersection. Completely disregarding the unspoken ‘stick together’ rule that the trio had made during their short polymorph-fighting misadventure, Lister kept on going. 

Once she was able to get to the split in the corridors, Kochanski stopped and put her hands on her knees trying to catch her breath. “What part of sticking together did he forget!?” She shouted in the hopes that some sort of sense would come out it.

* * *

Rimmer moved down the long, grimey corridors. All the lights were still on, and he was starting to get worried. His footsteps seemed to be getting louder. He slowed his pace a little bit, only to realise that he was hearing another set of footsteps getting closer. Good, this is good. 

Rimmer saw somebody turn a corridor and stopped in place. The figure looked up at him, left arm holding a canary gun. By the looks of it the figure was Lister. A Lister who didn’t take the time to speak him, aside from reading the gun that he apparently had on him. 

“Lister has a gun,” Rimmer said quietly to himself. A bit pointless to say since Lister did, in fact, have a gun. 

“Yes I have a gun!” Lister snapped, voice quavering a bit in a mix of exhaustion and frustration. He didn’t have the time for this. 

“Right.” Rimmer replied, putting his hands up. He opened his mouth to say something, figured it wouldn’t be good enough and swiftly closed it again to try and think of something better. “How’s it going?” He paused for another moment. “Lister what happened to your ar-“

“Shut up ya bug-eyed shape-shifting freak.”

Rimmer blinked in surprise. Lister wasn’t usually like this. “Wait, what? A Polymorph?” He guessed. 

Lister rolled his eyes. 

“Could you you please explain to me what’s going on?”

“I don’t need ta.” 

Rimmer looked at Lister with a face that very clearly screamed that he needed too.  
“Oh, you’re really gonna try and play dumb here?” 

“Lister you’re being completely irrational here.” Rimmer took a few steps forward, trying to calm Lister down. “You must have caught a bug or something last time we were out.”

“No, I haven’t,” Lister said, something crazed and manic glinting in his eyes. His face grew more solemn, his expression sterner than before. He was serious about this. “We figured out your little trick.”

“Trick?” Rimmer tried to put it all together in his mind, “what trick?”

Lister didn’t respond. 

“Lister I’m not a polymorph,” Rimmer pleaded, “put the gun down.” 

Lister aimed the gun towards Rimmer to the best of his ability. They were easy guns to use, he could give him that credit. 

“I’m Rimmer, _Rhi-merh_.” Rimmer said, putting his hands on his chest in hopes of adding some sort of clarity. 

“No, you smeggin’ ain’t. The whole crew got replaced by those blighters.” Lister began to pace, “Everybody on this ship are just Polymorphs that took on the forms of the crew.” He looked back and dead into Rimmer. “Considering that you, too, just happened to be part of this new crew. EEx-smeggin’-cuse me for assuming.”

You could see Rimmer visibly swallow a huge glop of stress-created saliva. Rimmer’s voice grew quiet, as if he were a child being scolded. “I- I’m not-“  
Lister raised eyebrow, totally apathetic. “Then what are ya?” he asked just to amuse him, not caring for an answer. 

“Look! I’m Rimmer, your old Rimmer. Old ‘Arn!” Rimmer tried desperately to convince him. 

Lister couldn’t keep straight face at that idea. 

“Look! Look, I can explain this. I’ve got my-” Rimmer stammered as he moved his hand to his pockets to find something to prove whatever point he was going to try and make. The pockets that he didn’t have, the pockets on his, Jacket. 

Ah, his jacket. The jacket that he had lost back in Officer Harks’ quarters while still being affected by the sexual magnetism virus. That jacket with all his old stuff in it. Rimmer took his hands off himself and let them hang at his side limply. “That I don’t have,” he said under his breath. Rimmer really should have thought that over in advanced. 

Lister laughed a cold, hopeless laugh. The laughing kept on going as the gun lowered, the sound of the laughter echoed around the room. Rimmer’s smile fell.  
“You’re really gonna be like this, huh? All this time you could have brought this up and you just, didn’t.”

Rimmer attempted to explain himself, but was cut off almost immediately.  
“Do you honestly think I’m going to believe this all of a sudden? That you just so happen to be the ‘incredible Ace Rimmer’ after all this time?” 

“What? What was I supposed to say?”

“Anything! Anything would have been better! Why would you hide this?” 

Rimmer opened his mouth to explain, but nothing of sense came out. Half of it being a brain dump of panic and the other half being him realising that he didn’t have anything worth saying. 

Lister’s face still didn’t change. “C’mon man, this isn’t going to work.” He said with a tired exhale. “You can’t worm your way out of this one.” There was a real pain to his voice. It was soft pain, like he regretted having it in the first place. 

“Lister, please-“ 

“I said, stop it.” 

Rimmer took a step back and tried to scout the room for something to help him. Concrete walls, concrete floors, it was just the two of them. Just the two of them and the cold emptiness of his situation. “You’re going to try and kill me, aren’t you?”

“Yep.” Lister replied. 

“And there isn’t anything I can do or say to stop you?”

“Now ya getting it.” 

Rimmer bit his lip.

Lister’s tied smile returned as he looked to the floor. “Maybe you are the real Rimmer,” he said with a sigh. “Only the real Rimmer would pull something like this.”

* * *

Ace Rimmer sat in the Wildfire. I wish that I could make this scene nice and peaceful, but it really wasn’t. You see, Ace was in his ship because he was currently on the run from a slew of simulant battleships. But of course, that’s nothing that our daring hero can’t face – you would assume. ‘Twas part of the job, after all. 

The intercom of his ship buzzed. “Ah, Ace Rimmer, what happened to you vibado? The spark?” Rolled the owner of the voice. 

“I think I lost it three moons back at that prisoner of war camp.” Ace said with a strong, Ionian snarl. 

The voice on the other end of the radio laughed a deep, villain-like laugh. Ace just rolled his eyes and kept on flying. Today had just been a pretty all-around shitty day from the start. 

“You can’t keep flying away from me and my ships like this, you know. Only a matter of time before I destroy-“

Ace muted that comm channel and flicked a few switches above his head. “Computer, How’s it looking?” He asked, not caring what the other figure had to say. 

“No development of late, I’ll advise to keep on target,” The ship’s computer purred back to him. 

“And the Vesino GELF fighters?”

“Still following.” 

“Great.” Ace snarled quietly as he adjusted the grip of his controls. “Would it be too hard to ask for something to go right for once? For the bad guy to stay down and the good guys to stay alive?” The computer made the sound it usually made when it tried to calculate. Ace rolled his eyes. “Don’t bother.” He said with a sigh. The tracker started to bleep loudly. Rimmer reached over to attend to it, but was stopped. Wildfire was hit with something, something big. The force of the hit caused Ace to be flug out of his seat and to smack his head on the top of his controls. The controls beeped in pankied response. 

“I want to go home.” Ace muttered under his breath as he sat back in his chair. His voice was a quite quiver of fear. Another missile shot the other side of his ship. Ace veered sharply to the left as he tried to counter it’s effect. 

“Shields at twenty-one per-“

“I know! I can read!” Rimmer cried out over the computer before diverging in the other direction. Life support was clean out, thank fuck he didn’t use it. 

Ace gripped the controls of his ship tightly as he tried to fight it for control. It was a losing battle, and he knew it. He flicked a few switches on his side, “Computer-“

“Calculating jump now.” The computer replied. 

Ace grit his teeth, the light of the drive began to engulf the ship as it’s speed began to increase. The lights of the starts around him began to streak. Another missile hit the ship from below, following Wildfire into the jump. The controls of the dimension jump drive chopped – they had been hit. 

The ship jumped. The empty blackness of space was replaced with a structure so large it took up there wasn’t enough time for any part of the ship to react. 

Ace tried to swivel upwards in a frantic scream. Nothing oh his ship was responding, he was flying blind and with whatever momentum that he had come in with, and that was too much to come back from. Wildfire skittered on the wall of the ship before it came to the side of a large shuttle bay door. The top of the ship, the cockpit, was the part hit the worse when it came to the end of the doorway causing the ship to spin into the bay itself. 

“I want to go home,” Rimmer whimpered again as he held onto the controls of his ship for dear life. It was louder the second time, there was no hope left in it. There wasn’t any time to bring that hope back before the ship crashed into a momentous stack of metal storage crates. 

Ace’s lightbee shot through the screen like a bullet as the window folded into itself. Himself and the ship smashed into the floor, his form flickering back and forth from soft and hard light as the momentum of the crash was still fresh into him. He kept on skitting on the floor before coming to a stop. He rolled his aching body around so he was back onto his stomach trying to catch his breath. 

 

In the heat of the jump, Wildfire had also tripped an old defence system that the ship once had in use. By the time the automotive system in charge of it was ready to fire Wildfire was already inside; somewhere the EMP wasn’t able to reach. The EMP, without anyone or anything shutting it off, then became hyper-sensitive to anything in its range. It would stay like that until an old beaten up Starbug would find itself travelling towards it and crashing into a completely different bay to the one that Wildfire had crashed into. 

The sound and shockwave of the crash had echoed throughout the whole of the hull; although there had been nobody there to hear it. All, aside from two hazmat-decked farm workers somewhere in their early to mid 30’s who were doing everything in their power to avoid actually working. The two of them had been talking to each other on top of an old crate of mined ore before the sound of the Wildfire crash caused them to stop and watch over it all. 

These two men had never seen anything like this happen before, and had absolutely no idea as to what to do next. It was an impressive crash, don’t get me wrong, but they were still a lot closer to it all than they would have wanted. 

After the ship had flown over them the two workers found themselves ducking and hiding behind crates and holding each other for support. 

“You alright?” The first asked, once the crash had settled. 

“Yeah, I think so,” the second replied as he left the hug. 

The two of them got up and leaned over their cover just enough to see the full extent of the crash. It was a few hundred meters away from the, but it felt like a lot less. After the initial shock of it all settled down with the airborne dirt and dust they finally came to their sensors enough to start to ask questions. One of the questions that were able to be brought up included that of what to do next. 

“We should probably do something.”

“Yes. We should.”

“Who do we tell?”

“Oh no, we can’t do that.”

“What?”

“They’ll know that we skipped work to be here.” 

The first worker blinked, hard and looked to his side at the other. “A man has just crashed a ship through our ship and you’re worried about getting in trouble from skipping on work and being there to see it happen?” 

“Yes! Does it hurt to be careful about that?”

The first worker looked at the second in pure bafflement. “We always wag! Everybody knows that we do that.” He looked back over at the crash site. “Hell, that’s all we do.”  
“I know that, but still.” The second tried to gesture his expression to a more fitting expression. He wouldn’t be good at charades judging by his efforts, let me just say. Not that Polymorphs even could play charades - that was. You get my point. 

“You’re a strange person, you know that?”

“Shush, he’s moving.” Calling the man a man felt somewhat strange, like it wasn’t true. It was clear what it was meant to be, but they could sense that he was some sort of computer, but not really know why they were getting that vibe. The two of them chose to ignore this feeling. 

 

Ace was on the floor, his form still glitching and sputtering like a broken VHS as his damaged lightbee tried to put him back together. He coughed as he supported his weight on his elbows. 

_Shitty day! A very shitty day!_

Ace blinked and tried to calm his breathing. He was flickering between soft and hardlight, and with a whack of his chest he went back to normal. Dust began to fill his body and compiled in his lungs, causing a sharp coughing fit. Time and pain passed before Ace forced himself up to a shaky stand. 

“Arnold?” a voice came from around a storage box. It was the first thing that the owner of the voice though to say. 

This made Ace jump and turn around to face it. His eyes grew large as they tried to take in as much information as possible. _Voice? Person? What? Red Dwarf. No people on that. Person was on that. This isn’t a person that he knows, help?_

“You alright, there?” The voice asked. The first worker was the one to have poked his head around and speak. 

Ace looked at the face the voice belonged to, frantically trying to figure out what it was. It looked like a completely normal person. “Y-yes,” he was able to force out.  
The first worker paused for a moment and bit his lip. “Alright then, I’ll take ya word on that.”

“Thanks.” Rimmer replied, black-faced. 

There was quite between the two. Something fell off the weak of Ace’s ship with a crash, causing what was left of the ship to collapse with a depressing thud. Everybody saw and heard it happen, but they didn’t acknowledge it other than watching it happen. 

“So, whatcaaaaa doin’ in the cargo hull?” The worker said once the crashing stopped. He rocked on his feet as he said it in not exactly a singing tone, but not exactly a speaking one, either. 

Ace’s face went blank. He looked down at his ruined costume as if it was suddenly going to turn into a teleprompter. 

“Is that for the costume party?”

“What? Costume party?” Ace asked, eyebrows raising with his face. 

“Yeah, yaknow? The one that’s tonight? I heard that the captain is going to go dressed as a chicken or something.” The first worker had no real idea what he was saying. It was if he already knew what to say, but not entirely. He sure didn’t know about this party, or even fully what one was, but he somehow suddenly knew that it entailed and that the person that he was speaking to did. 

This was the effect of being a species that could read people’s minds. Things can just come to you like that. Not that that made much of a difference to his state of mind of the whole affair, he was so ‘domesticated’ it wouldn’t have mattered. 

“So who are you?”

“Just some comic book character.” Ace said has he fixed up his fuzzy collar. He always thought he looked like one, anyways. Some sort of golden age chap who got to punch Nazis on the daily. 

“Cool, cool. Uh - why are you in it in the cargo hold, Arnold?”

“Just a test.” Ace squeaked. 

“A… test?”

“Well,” Ace began to stammer, he really wasn’t all that good at this sort of thing, “Better for a button to come loose now when I can still go back and fix it then tonight, right?” He explained with a smile. He really, really wanted to get out of there. It, and excuse me for sounding like even more of a nerd than I already am, like he somehow rolled a nat1 in deception in real life. 

“True, true.” The worker said as he looked over at the shipwreck before him. “Some test, alright.”

“Yes.” Rimmer replied with a smile. 

The first worker coughed into his hand and looked back at his partner who had been watching the conversation struggle along from not too far behind him. “We’ll let you do that.” He continued, the other man nodded. 

“Yes, thank you.” Ace replied before walking way in a fast march. 

The two workers looked at each other once Ace way far away enough for them not to see him bolt out of there, trip on a rock, stand back up, and keep on running out of the doorway. “Why do I get the feeling that this is going to end in a lot of pain and death for everybody involved?” The second asked.

 

* * *

 

Ace zipped up his jacket and marched down the halls with his head low and arms around his chest. Some people looked at him, but the tried his best to ignore them all.  
He got to his old dorm room, the one that he uses to sleep in when he used to work on the Red Dwarf. The room was pretty much untouched from back when he used to work there, too. 

This left Ace with a particularly annoying situation. He knew that he was going to cross paths with himself from this dimension, and he knew that he would exist here because a, all of his stuff was here, and b, that worker had recognized him. 

His plan was to wait for him to arrive, and then explain everything. It wasn’t a good plan, but there was bugger all that he could really do. 

The alternate version himself never showed up. At one point this universe’s Lister came in while in a paint-covered EVA suit and crashed on his bed without saying a word. He was so exhausted from whatever he was doing in it he didn’t even occur to him to ask what Rimmer was doing standing by the window in a Mimas test pilot uniform. By the time Ace had been able to make conversation with Lister, Lister was already out cold. 

But still, no other Rimmer. This struck nobody else as being odd. 

 

Over time Ace, now stuck being an Ace no longer, came to an understanding that he was pretty much stuck here for the foreseeable future. He changed his clothing from his test pilot uniform to his JMC one, put the wig and the rest of his gizmos away and just went on with the life he was living in once again. A few weeks of this passed. In those weeks he had slowly started to enjoy it all. 

One morning Rimmer woke up late to Lister not being there. Usually, he was asleep at this hour, weird. Of course, Rimmer did consider looking for him, but he came to the conclusion that if Lister was going to bugger off from work, then let him. 

Rimmer did his rounds alone that day. All the way to about smoko time when a ship-wide report of small transport ship crashing into one of the docking bays. Naturally, Rimmer didn’t assume that this meant anything to him – it wasn’t his job to deal with it all. This assumption was proven wrong, however, when it got out that one of the people involved in the transport ship crash was none other than Lister. That fact alone was enough to get Rimmer invested in it all. 

A lot seemed to stand out about Lister now. Rimmer didn’t even notice all of them at first because he was so excited to be able to rub the impending punishments he was going to face in his well, face. 

“How’va been going man?” Lister said after Rimmer had strolled in, for some reason more than happy to see Rimmer. Lister was in a dingy old beige boiler suit covered in who-knows-what. His right arm also seemed, dead. Not being as expressive as his left one, instead just hanging there by his side. 

“What on Io got into you?” Rimmer began to say with a smirk. “You can’t fly a Starbug, miladdo! You’re a technician! A zero! A complete and utter nobody!” He began to list off insults before Lister cut in over him. 

“Cat was the one flying it. I was the flight surgeon, ya know? Keeping a lookout for anything upcoming, managing the guns -”

“Starbugs don’t have any guns, Listy. They’re transport ships. It’s all cargo and whatever people leave on them after trips.” Rimmer replied as he began to tap his toe on the floor. Besides, Cat was a better pilot than that. Sure, he wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t crash-into-the-hull bad. 

_Hang on. Cat? That didn’t seem right. Cat shouldn’t exist yet._

Lister kept on talking, unaware of the concern and recognition that was worming it’s way through every muscle in Rimmer’s eyebrows. 

“Rimmer, this is gonna sound nuts, but the whole crew died, including you.”

“I died?” Rimmer asked with a sharp crack in his voice, folding his arms to keep them together. _Stop, hang on._  
“Yeah.” Lister replied.

“All of them? So what about you?” Rimmer’s foot began to dance away from his leg in a concentrated form of raw panic. _Where is this going. I don’t like where this is going._

“No,” Lister replied, “I got put into stasis for smuggling me cat on board. Then there was this big accident where everybody was killed except me. You caused it when you disrepaired a drive plate years ago.”

Rimmer’s face seemed to dot itself into one of discus. It wasn’t what he was feeling, but how the emotion expressed itself. 

You and I know both know how the rest of this conversation went. Rimmer let Lister talk and explain the situation, every point that he made seeming to line up exactly with what his old Lister had experienced; well, everything besides Kochanski being a part of the crew. 

Rimmer shot him another look. That must be the deference in this universe; something with Kochanski – however the timeline in effect here was meant to work. “The same Kochanski you dated a couple of weeks back? Why was she with you?”

“She’s from another universe, one where she was the one to be put into stasis instead of me. A month or two ago she accidentally got stuck here and we’ve been trying to get her back home.”

Now, this caught Rimmer by a little bit of surprise. It wasn’t the explanation of Kochanski being there he was expecting, but he was happy to buy it for the time being. “So, time travel and multiple universes? You should write a book, Lister.” He said, trying to make sense as to what was happening. 

“You have absolutely no idea what we’ve all been through so far.” Lister said with a sigh. 

_I think I do have an idea,_ Rimmer thought to himself, _I think that I do._

There was a while of quite with neither of them knowing what to say. 

Lister’s face changed to a mix of fear and determination and he faced Rimmer. “Rimmer you’ve got to help me get out of here.” 

“Why? You can’t run from this. They’ll just catch you and make your sentence longer. Marvellous.” Rimmer found himself saying as he rolled over on his bed. “Here one day out of your hair for the rest of the trip the next. What’s this? Heaven?” Rimmer’s own face changed. What was he doing? Insulting Lister was so second nature to him that it seemed to take president over anything else in that moment. It was so in his nature he couldn’t stop himself. 

“I’m not trying to escape,” Lister corrected himself, “well, I am – but I do need your help.”

“What? Me?” Rimmer snorted. What could he do? His shit was a totalled wreak down in one of the cargo bays. 

Lister shook his head. “Who else is going to help me? I'm confined to quarters. The minute I walk through that door, I get enough wattage up my jacksie to light up the whole of Bootle!”

Rimmer kept to his bed. “Well, considering what the future has in store for your jacksie, a couple of zillion volts is going to be easy street.” He looked bad at Lister. Lister looked the same as his old one, a couple years older than the one he had seen yesterday, a few more scars and longer dreads. This Lister looked as if he had just escaped a ship crash. 

Well, duh. He did. 

“This is all going to go horribly, Lister, you know that right?” Rimmer said trying to think of something better to say. 

“It can’t be any worse than being sent to prison.” Lister replied, falling back into the chair behind him in defeat.

 

* * *

 

Rimmer stood in his place, Lister’s gun planted sqarely on him. Lister took a few long breaths. He didn’t even know if he was getting ready to shoot anymore, today had already been so goddam smeging weird already. 

Kochanski turned the sharp corner, the sound of her boots skirting as she came to a sudden stop with her arms out to keep balance. Cat’s boots did the same, only this time only being saved from falling over by being able to catch Kochanski as he stumbled past her at breakneck speed. 

“Lister!” She called out. 

Lister turned around. Rimmer’s hands went back up as he mined the words ‘help me’ to her. Kochanski didn’t see it. Cat stood up, but didn’t say anything. One of his ears flicked. Kochanski looked up at Rimmer with a careful eyebrow. Rimmer tried to mine again, but it didn’t really help his case. 

Lister’s gun began to bubble. He tried to adjust his grip on the thing, but that very quickly proved itself rather difficult. His fingers began to stick to the black of the handle, and the black began to climb up his hand. Lister began to try and throw the gun to the floor but the whole device took over his body, quickly engulfed Lister’s face, causing him to try and scream a muffled scream as he tried to pry the formally disguised polymorph off. His boot when up to kick it, causing a tendril to appear and wrap around it. Whatever Lister had planned to say in response to the whole situation was lost along with the struggle. Within a few long moments, Lister was out. His body stopped moving and his breath drew to an agonising slow. 

Rimmer didn’t have much to say in response. All the colour left his face causing it to grow chalk white in closed mouth fear. His hands were still up in surrender right up until a sharp spike of solid light ran through his back. He looked down at the spike and then to Cat and Kochanski. Kochanski put her hands over her mouth before the spike expanded in a painful bubble. The light turned into a claw-like structure and the Lightbee that had been inside of him was flung into the wall, his body hitting it with a loud thud. The bee sputtered for a few seconds, before falling to the floor with a tink. Rimmer’s body glitched between soft and hard light before giving up and disappearing altogether. 

Kochanski and Cat took steps back. 

The floor came up like concert-coloured elastic, and before Kochanski could do anything about it she was retrained and thrown back onto the floor with enough force she wasn’t able to respond. The floor had saved her from being hurt in any major way, but it didn’t stop it from fully engulfing her. The ground retreated back into the ground, leaving nothing but empty space where she once was. 

Cat blinked and tried to asset his situation. His ear flicked again before he dove out of the way in a move fuelled by pure instinct. By the time Cat had realised what he was doing he had lept over a crate and had used a loose board from a wooden crate as some sort of makeshift weapon. His heart began to beat rapidly, his breath not taking long to catch up to the pace. The board in his arms began to move, causing him to use all of his strength to slam it into the bottom of the crate as he jumped back off it. 

He straighten his back and put his arms to the side in tight fists. “Is that it? Is that all you’ve got?’ he yowled out into the void. He looked down and the incapacitated Lister, and before he was able to do anything the void responded. The air grew thick, a dark fog surrounded him. Cat pulled the collar of his prison uniform over his mouth, and though phlegm-filled coughed he began to ran. Wherever he went the dust seemed to follow, getting thicker and thicker as the seconds marched by. 

Cat jumped over a container and began to run across it. He felt his eyes beginning to go dousy, and more than once he had to remove the collar to hack out what felt like a hairball out of his lungs, only to inhale more of the stuff in doing so. Cat bit down into his collar and jumped up a crate, his nails acting like claws into the aging material. He swing his leg over to get to the top, but missed. Cat’s left arm was the next thing to move, but it didn’t get all that far. 

Cat pushed the fabric out of his face and tried to cough. His vision grew blurry, and whatever effort he was able to make to keep going was lost as soon as Cat let go and fell. He was asleep by the time he was to land. 

The old lightbee by the wall buzzed and sputtered once more before giving up.

 

In the far distance, far away from the rest of our cast, a slow, concerned alarm began to sound. An alarm that begged for anybody that was there to help. Something on the ship was wrong, something horrible was about to happen and only a crewmate could help. Unfortunately for the ship, there were no crewmates left that could help. Cat didn’t know what this sound meant, if even if he was there to hear it. 

Regardless, I’ll tell you know what that sound meant. There was a drive plate malfunction somewhere on the ship. A malfunction that if not attempted too would cost the lives of all on-board.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Local polymorphs keep getting roped in the adventures of the non-polymorphs. Help them.


End file.
